Thistlefoot was not even remotely what I expected. It's Baba Yaga! We've got Eastern European folklore, a house on chicken legs, two 20-something siblings and a traveling puppet show. Whimsical, right? Whew. Thistlefoot deftly reimagines the story of Baba Yaga by framing it within the intergenerational trauma of a Jewish family, bringing heartbreaking humanity to Baba Yaga and her mythical descendants while pushing the reader to bear witness to their grief. Nethercott blends folklore and personal legacy here, drawing on the history of her own family's shtetl in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Multiple alternating POVs create slow-building tension throughout, and a recurring POV from our chicken-legged house brings present day together with memories and folktales.

Thistlefoot is haunting and macabre and tragic and also lovely. It is all of those things because the history and reality it reflects for us is all of those things. When terms like genocide give us the false impression of a start and an end, a defined historical timetable of violence, a book like Thistlefoot reminds us that for the Jewish people, this history stretches back millennia and continues into present day. Thistlefoot reminds us it only takes a single lie to start a mob: "... what is a lie if not a story? ... what power a story has when whispered into the ear of a man with a gun."

It is always important to read Jewish stories, and now would be a particularly good time for those of us who did not inherit this trauma to spend time with this story. The writing is poetic, the characters are flawed and dynamic and the folklore is mesmerizing. This was a five-star read for me.