“Greenteeth” by Molly O’Neill

This was a decent book that could have been a great book, if Orbit’s marketing people hadn’t pushed it as “cozy” and the author had embraced writing something YA (which is not and has never been a pejorative).

Jenny Greenteeth has been living in her English lake for centuries, leaving the nearby village alone and happy to be left alone in turn. Her life gets unexpectedly interesting when the villagers toss a chained village woman into her lake (rude!). Rather than eat the woman, Jenny decides to take her to her lakebottom cave and revive her. The woman, Temperance, is a witch, and was denounced by the new village pastor, who is in fact the demonic Erl King. Along with Jenny’s frenemy Brackus the goblin peddler, the trio set out to seek the High Fae and get their help casting out the Erl King and reuniting Temperance with her husband and children.

As I said at the top, this could have been a great YA book, and honestly I think that’s what the story wanted to be. YA isn’t anything bad; it can mean a variety of things, but in this case I mean something straightforward. There’s a good reason we’ve been telling stories about the Hero’s Journey for thousands of years, and this would have been a great Hero’s Journey if that was what O’Neill wanted it to be. But partway through the book she introduces tension between Jenny and Temperance; it felt hugely contrived, and (without knowing the creative process) felt like it was there because someone decided it needed to be. It disrupted the flow of the story, and left a bad taste in my mouth that took a while to wash out.

Imagining this novel without that tension, I’d call it a 5 out of 5. With it, I’m thinking about 3 and a half.

And as for the marketing: I get that “cozy” is popular nowadays, but this isn’t cozy and shouldn’t have been presented as such. Expectations matter and shape the experience.