The Bone Swans of Amandale

Fairy Tale stories have been all the rage for the past few years. In fact, now that 2025 has hit, I’m starting to grow weary of the deluge of fairy tale and mythology retellings. There are plenty of great ones out there of course, but I’ve just seen so many that they get lost in the shuffle. The Bone Swans of Amandale isn’t a retelling, though it does reference a few fairy tales, but instead is a story that evokes the dark fairy tale style in a way I haven’t seen any other book do.

As a note, you can read Bone Swans from the collection Bone Swans: Stories, or you can read it for free here.

Elevator Pitch:
This dark fairy tale adjacent story is told by Maurice, a rat-folk who can shift between rat and human. He’s got an unrequited love for a swan-folk lass named Dora Rose who can’t stand him, and whose sister (and whole extended family really) has been killed by the mayor of the nearby town, a descendent of ogres and giants who uses magic to keep the town spellbound. To help his childhood crush, he ropes in the Pied Piper and a few kids who’d gotten on the mayor’s bad side, and lets hell loose in the process.

What Worked for Me
Maurice’s voice is really what sells the novel. He’s not a good person. He’s selfish, snarky, and unhealthily obsessed with Dora Rose. He’s self-aware of his flaws, and you never get the sense that the author is condoning Maurice’s obsession. He’s charismatic, and feels like the embodiment of all the baggage we put on rats (there’s a monologue about how rats love theater and will do anything for dramatic impact that was to die for). Dora Rose is similarly embodied of what we’d associate with swans: regal, cold, and pretentious. The whole story is like that: layered with enough acknowledgment of our assumptions about how characters should be and stories should go that you realize it’s playing with the reader in a slightly humorous way. But by leaning into these tropes and executing them well, it hooks you utterly.

The story also hearkens back to the Brother’s Grimm era of fairy tales. Things are dark and bloody. Lessons are brutal, unforgiving, and vaguely nonsensical. The sense of abstract power you feel while reading as a child was captured in this book, and its a perfect story for people who feel like fantasy has left behind the idea that magic can be weird and nonsensical and mystic.

What Didn’t Work for Me
I think the story’s pacing lagged a little bit around the 2/3 mark, but for a novella I ate in a day and a half in little bites, I can forgive that. I’m also curious if reading it in physical form, instead of on my laptop screen (which I despise) would have helped. As it was, there was a lot of scrolling involved.

In Conclusion: A smarmy (but funny) rat folk destabilizes a town’s ogress mayor to try and impress his crush.

• Characters – 5
• Worldbuilding – 4
• Craft – 4
• Themes – 3
• Enjoyment – 5