I rage-finished this book. No, seriously, I finished it by dreaming of the angry Goodreads review I would write when I was done because it wasn't enough to be angry silently, I had to explain what was so wrong with it.
And I wanted so badly to like it. I loved the idea of deconstructing the tropes of fantasy by merging book and reader, by bringing in the "real" to analyze the text and it's all there, but it's all wrong.
Also, where the hell did Pip go to university where she could write about trope laden, contemporary fantasy as her dissertation without moving into a larger feminist or new historicist reading of fantasy as such?
But I digress. The biggest problem I had, the character that fundamentally ruined the book for me, was Forsyth Turn, whose point of view I had the distinct displeasure of sharing. He's the worst.
In attempting to deconstruct the trope of the uncouth adventurer—one version of masculine supremacy—Frey introduces us to the intellectual polymath who embodies the other main expression of masculine supremacy that has dogged society for ages. Instead of the entitled asshole, she gives us the man child for whom women exist as balm to his lack of self esteem. Instead of the jock, we get Forsyth Turn, male nerd extraordinaire.
In the beginning, he's written as a character with serious anxiety, but without the actual emotional and situational ramifications that having anxiety brings. It is never disabling. There are so few protagonists with actual mental disabilities and you could have given us one.
But no, instead we get another variation of the man for whom women exist only insofar as they better his life. He wants to love, but he had an amazingly hard time of conceiving of love as anything beyond "you make me feel good". Love is broken when it hurts him and only acceptable when it makes him feel good. His low self esteem is fixed by falling in love, which is NOT how that works in the real world.
Which brings me to Pip. In an attempt to deconstruct the treatment of women in fantasy, Frey subjects her female protagonist to EVERY SHITTY FEMALE TROPE in the genre. And Pip points this out, but a bit of acknowledgement does not a deconstruction make. The text doesn't do anything with those moments and the really insidious ones, the way that women in fantasy lack narrative agency and are treated as the prize for the protagonist, remain integral to the story.
There are lots of moments, but there is one in particular I HAVE to call out

After it's revealed that Pip has been under mind control, Forsyth the ever-entitled is unable to step back and appreciate why she doesn't want him near her. He kisses her without her consent and she flips (I cheered). To cope, he then sacrifices his love for her to move along the quest, which she also finds hurtful and the goddamn narrative sides with him!!! Her refusal to open up to him after she's been grossly violated is equated to his pain at being rejected. The narrative privileges the experience of male rejection over her experience of rape and violation and later has her FUCKING APOLOGIZE for hurting him and then demanding he not hurt her. No. Just no. Context matters. Experience matters. Her trauma is not the same as his and it's one of the most dangerous expressions of patriarchy in our culture that rejection is considered as bad as if not worse than coercion.

The Untold Turn entirely fails in its project to upend the tropes of misogynist fantasy. It leaves behind the overt misogyny of the jock and revels in the misogyny of the geek, creating a character whose worship of women as unattainable and inability to love her beyond how she makes him feel makes me want to vomit. By the end of the book, I was so disappointed that Frey couldn't have managed the really radical story and had Pip just punch him in the face and leave with naught but the cry of good riddance. Or just given her a voice at all.