Key themes
- The princess who becomes a nun to escape the marriage market — and what she does instead
- Fairy tale quests for women too old, too plain, too unimportant to be heroines
- Dark humour alongside genuine horror — the tone that makes both work
About this book
Marra, a princess who became a nun to avoid the political marriages used to control her sisters, sets out on an impossible quest — build a dog from bones, weave a cloak of nettles, capture moonlight in a jar — to kill the prince who is destroying her family. Kingfisher's Hugo Award-winning fairy-tale novel is darkly funny, genuinely frightening in places, and centres on women too old, too plain or too unimportant for most fairy tales to notice.
Published in 2022, Nettle and Bone won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. T. Kingfisher is the adult fiction pen name of Ursula Vernon, known for whimsical, often darkly comic fantasy that subverts traditional fairy tale structures.
Discussion questions
- Marra's quest — build a dog of bones, weave a cloak of nettles, capture moonlight — follows fairy tale logic of impossible tasks. How does Kingfisher use these tasks — as plot obstacles, as character development, or as something that reveals what kind of person Marra is becoming?
- The novel centres women who fairy tales usually ignore — a middle-aged godmother, an elderly dust-wife, a princess who chose the convent over marriage. What is Kingfisher saying about whose stories typically get told?
- The prince Marra sets out to kill is established as genuinely monstrous early in the novel — there's no ambiguity about whether he deserves it. How does this clarity affect the novel's moral register — does it simplify or focus the story?
- Kingfisher's tone moves between genuine horror (some of the imagery is quite disturbing) and wry humour. How does this combination work — and does the humour ever undercut the horror, or does it make it land harder?
- Nettle and Bone won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. What does it do that earns recognition within a field often dominated by epic-scale space opera and high fantasy — and what does its smaller, more personal scale achieve?
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