Here's another debut novel, my third this month and my second from a major publisher. I have no doubt that Maddie Martinez is a pantser not a plotter because this book grows in odd directions that deepen the primary character but don't necessarily help the overall story. I ended up feeling that the book I finished wasn't the book I started and that's not something I'm used to. Maybe it's a realistic way of teaching the lead character that the world is a heck of a lot bigger than she may think it is, but that doesn't necessarily aid the story.

It starts out as a relatively small scale fantasy. Five years earlier, the forest outside the village of Eskrevé changed. It used to be Kratzka Šujana, a nourishing forest that provided the village with food. Now it's Mavetéh, a name meaning "into death". Plants withered and died. So did animals. And women are taken by the forest or the monster within it. Not just girls, but women, including Malka's best friend Chaia. The men call the monster Rayga and they periodically hunt it but more as an opportunity to drink than to seriously stop the horror.

If that wasn't enough for the people of Eskrevé, there's also the Order of the Paja, created by the Ozmini Chruch to collect tithes. Too much. Too often. They're cruel with their oppression, perhaps increasingly so. And they don't believe in the monster, so when Rzepka is taken, they arrest Imma, Malka's mother, the local healer who was trying to save her. Malka is given three weeks to go into the forest and bring back the monster to prove Imma's innocence. Thus we have a straightforward quest novel. Malka's the lead, the monster is the goal, the forest is the backdrop.

And, for a while, that's what we get and I'm not upset at all. The forest is a wonderful location for a quest novel. Malka, along with Anman, her betrothed who won't let her go without him, and two knights of the Order sent by their leader, Father Brozek: vicious Václav and kind Aleksi. Neither of the Ozmini last long, though they're there to see the pit of decaying bodies, comprised of Ozmini and Yahad both. They're also there to see the monster, a golem created by the Maharal in Valón, now tethered by Kefesh magic to the great Oak Tree at the centre of the forest. Then they die.

Malka and Anman don't, however, because the golem, Nimrah by name, isn't remotely what they expect. Surely she's the Rayga but they can't drag her back. Instead they deal, finding a way to do what must be done to free Imma, and they all set off to do precisely that, each of them different from the next but growing inexorably together as they go until the story isn't quite as clear as it was when they started. It's all a heady mixture for a fantasy novel and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

However, by the time they get out of the forest, everything changes and it seems like we're in an altogether different story. Now we're in the city, Valón, where the Yahad are restricted to their own quarter and forced to wear identifying tags. We know from history what sort of oppression is eager for that sort of thing, given that it's completely clear from the outset that the Yahad are a thinly disguised take on the Jewish people. Martinez talks in her author's note about how one of the principal inspirations was the tale of the Golem of Prague, which told of the oppression of the Jews by the antisemitic Holy Roman Emperor.

And this is fine too, because both are stories well-worth telling but not necessarily at exactly the same time. It reminded me of 'The Winternight Trilogy' by Katherine Arden, but she changed her story by books. 'The Bear and the Nightingale' told a rural folk tale, a bitterly cold story drenched in snow and the claustrophobia that comes with isolation. It's a beginning for the story of Vasilisa Petrovna which is continued in the other two books, but in very different fashion. 'The Girl in the Tower' takes her into the city and a bigger, noisier, more populated environment for her story to continue in. It works, as they're two different books. Here, 'The Bear and the Nightingale' is the first third and 'The Girl in the Tower' is the rest and it doesn't remotely work as well.

Suddenly, it's a more epic tale of intrigue. Martinez rips one rug out from under our feet, fully a hundred and fifty pages in, which is why I'm not telling you what it is. I totally didn't expect it and it feels a little like a cheat, because suddenly the personal motivation that drove the first third of the book is proved false, as if it wasn't important after all. Now the forest is almost forgotten, an abiding worry on Malka's part about the fate of Imma and Eskrevé notwithstanding. Now it's all about Valón and the oppression of the Yahad by the Ozmini and we're dealing directly with kings and archbishops. The scale is completely different, the stakes are completely different and we're rather sympathetic to how lost Malka suddenly feels, her story shrivelled by the bigger picture.

By the way, while the Yahad are clearly Jews, who are the Ozmini? The names seem to be eastern European not Arabic, but don't ring true for Czech or whatever Prague was under the Holy Roman Empire. The wicked priest dominating Eskrevé is Father Brozek and that z with an overdot is only found in Polish and Maltese (and Emilian-Romagnol, which is northern Italian). Then again, while I had to look up a bunch of words, they were Hebrew rather than eastern European. Sufganiyot is a pastry eaten during Hannukah, making it odd to show up in a fictional fantasy world; tzimmes is a stew associated with Rosh Hashanah, so ditto; and koilitch is a special bread, often eaten during weddings, which applies here. Apparently I don't know much about Jewish food.

Incidentally, the latter two, tzimmes and koilitch are Ashkenazi Jewish, which leads me to a point that's important here. It's fantastic to see a fantasy novel rooted in Jewish culture and folklore; I've loved the idea of golems since seeing the 1920 Paul Wegener movie, also based on 'The Golem of Prague'. It isn't the first I've seen and I've reviewed a few horror novels with Jewish bedrock of late, but it is the first I've seen distinguish between different subgroups. The Yahad in this novel aren't all the same and their differences often tie to belief, the most obvious difference between the two primary subgroups being their take on Kefesh.

As Martinez explains in her author's note, Kefesh doesn't have a direct equivalent in the Jewish faith in our world, being an amalgam of different spiritual practices, but it's basically the magic that's wielded by Jews who believe it; not just God-given but a direct connection to God, Yahweh here being Yohev. In Eskrevé, the Yahad see it as dark magic that's complete anathema. In Valón, it's seen as a gift, something the Yahad have that the Ozmini don't, and it does wonderful things, even if some of them can go horribly wrong, like, for instance, the Golem, created to aid Yahadi people but eventually accidentally killing one.

While the quest that Malka embarks upon changes in many ways as the story twists and turns its way out of her control, one of the core elements throughout is her relationship to Kefesh. At the beginning, she is horrified and repulsed by it. Then she has to wield it to save Anman's life and it starts to evolve in her mind. By the end, she understands its power and has a healthy respect for what she can do with it. Like so many things, it's a tool and tools can be put to good or bad use in the hands of good or bad people. That does not make it inherently good or bad.

I liked this but I'd have liked it more as two different books. The forest story that takes up maybe a third of the novel could have been bulked up atmospherically to serve as volume one, while the rest in the city could have shifted out to be volume two. That forest story is dark fantasy, with an awful lot that's delicious and as much that's loathsome. It's lush and paranoid and evocative. The rest is adventure fantasy, heroic and sacrificial. It benefits from its unusual cultural backdrop but its impact is spread over a broad spectrum. It's not about individual people, it's about a people. I liked both but it's like going from 'Mythago Wood' to 'The Prisoner of Zenda'.

It's also a romance, which didn't work for me at all. I get that it plays deliberately to a trope, the sort of thing advertised on the tables of my friends who write romance and romantasy and which I'm having fun applying to the horror genre. This particular trope is enemies to lovers, which is a bit of a giveaway, but then this novel is called 'The Maiden and Her Monster'. It gives that strand away in its very title. Malka is repulsed by Nimrah, who clearly has other thoughts, and she stays that way until it almost hurts her to do so and then they're lovers. Maybe that's the point of the trope and its fans will revel in the yearning and the cruel rejection but it didn't work for me.

What did work was the spiritual aspect. I was fascinated by the use of Kefesh, not just in what it means over time to Malka and indeed to Nimrah, but inherently in what it is. Maybe it's telling that my favourite character wasn't Malka at all, but the Maharal, with Nimrah a distant second. Sadly it's not his story so he flits and out of it at points as it needs, but I wanted more of him. Every time he spoke to Malka about Kefesh, my eyes lit up and my attention focused. But then he'd leave again and we'd be back in a more generic story. Kefesh is the lifeblood of this book, not sapphic love. ~~ Hal C F Astell