Have I reached my personal peak of reading fairytale retellings? Possibly.

Not only is this a retelling of one of my top 5 fairytales (- the top 5 being The Goose Girl, The Peasant‘s Wise Daughter, All-Kinds-of-Fur, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and The Little Match Girl -), it is also a wonderful retelling.

I loved recognising aspects of the Goose Girl throughout the story. And as someone who was very creeped out by Falada in every movie adaptation I saw as a child, I loved the take on that horse here. It was fun having Cordelia as the young protagonist in contrast to the other protagonist Hester who is in her fifties. T. Kingfisher once again managed to write a dark story filled with humour and that touched upon different topics of womanhood, with compelling characters and beautiful prose. I appreciated that some threads of the story were left unanswered and unfinished.

You don‘t need to know the Goose Girl to enjoy this story, but it adds a lot to the experience being familiar with the fairytale.

a recurring problem i have with the english romance novels i’ve come across in the past few years is the tendency for their characters’ dialogue to sound like therapyspeak. it doesn’t sound natural or like something a human would say; in fact, the focus is not really on their characterisation (as good dialogue should emphasise), but rather on the words they’re saying and the ideas the author is pushing through them. this novel magnifies that problem by several degrees by having jamie take on the role of being edgar’s therapist, which is just so wrong on so many levels that i often found myself speechless with horror as i was reading. as far as i am aware, professional etiquette dictates that a therapist should not be familiar with their client prior to any engagement with them. this is to prevent any pre-existing bias from colouring the way they view their client and the help they can offer them, which is obviously not possible if they already know their client outside of this setting. it is therefore not remotely healthy or romantic in the slightest for your romantic partner to act as your therapist, and it’s rather concerning that roan parrish seems to believe that it is.

jamie’s positioning of themself as edgar’s makeshift therapist stems from the larger problem i have with their relationship. jamie states that they are attracted to edgar because he seemed lonely, out of place, and essentially like someone who needed to be centred in the present, preferably by jamie themself. while that’s already a troubling way to view your potential partner, jamie then goes on to say that they have a saviour complex in relationships later on. yikes. they then proceed to get extremely pushy about edgar’s issues in a way that seems as though they believe they have a right to know everything they wish to, solely based on their role as edgar’s partner, which is just incredibly intrusive. i don’t find this cute at all, and i don’t see how their relationship can possibly last with such a set-up. jamie’s attraction to edgar is based on them wanting to save edgar, so what happens after edgar is “fixed”? how does jamie plan on navigating a relationship they no longer need a saviour complex for? apparently, these are questions parrish does not need answers for, because we don’t get them in the text.

some other questions that never get answered in the text relate to the complete and utter lack of disbelief in edgar’s ability to see ghosts. look, i come from a culture where our parents still tell us not to look over our shoulders during ghost month for fear that wandering ghosts will snuff out the living flames on our shoulders and heads. even then, i think i’d still have plenty of questions if my friend suddenly told me one day that he can see ghosts. jamie’s reaction was perhaps the most drastic, because it meant that there was absolutely no pay-off for the brief stumbling-block they and edgar encountered in their relationship due to this secret. the worst part is that i think there’s a perfectly reasonable solution to it too? all parrish would’ve had to do was to emphasise the legend of edgar’s family in the community, preferably through jokes made by jamie’s and edgar’s friends, and that would’ve been enough to lessen most of the disbelief. instead we get nothing.

speaking of edgar’s family, the “haunting” in the title has more to do with edgar’s metaphorical haunting (by his ghost-related trauma, by his family issues, etc) than with a literal haunting. the ghosts he sees are just a very unsubtle metaphor for all these things, especially given the fact that edgar’s abilities stem from his family. while i would ordinarily be quite interested in such a story, it’s not really handled very well in this novel. parrish fails to appropriately balance the importance of edgar’s family issues against the literal ghosts that metaphorise them, which leads to a very odd situation where the reader is confused by which element they are meant to be paying more attention towards. much of the disappointment towards the lack of paranormal elements in this book could have been alleviated had parrish handled this set-up better. unfortunately, as with most of this book, it’s become nothing more than a cool idea with poor execution.