Bumpy Oak Books

**I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

2 stars

The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass is Adan Jerreat-Poole’s YA fantasy debut. The story involves all the sorts of things you would hope for in a YA fantasy; witches, assassins, magic, adventure, and more. Readers follow Eli, a witch-made thing turned assassin, as she meets humans who make her feel and help her to understand she can be more than a witch’s pet.

One of the great things this novel has going for it is representation. The main character, Eli, is queer. Tav, a human character Eli meets who becomes central to the story, is both black and nonbinary. Cam, the second human character who is pivotal, is of mixed race with ancestry from Vietnam and is also gay. The novel also seems to be own voices representation for queerness and nonbinary people, as it seems Jerreat-Poole self-identifies as queer and uses they/them pronouns.

Conceptually, the things that were featured in this novel were very interesting and were somewhat fresh compared to other ideas that are prevalent in the YA fantasy market. Unfortunately, I was not a fan of the execution.

Jerreat-Poole’s writing style isn’t one that is for me, though it communicates well an atmosphere of this kind of magical, lyrical fever dream. I also found the story to be a little info dump-y in various places. Readers were directly told about aspects of the world in distinct paragraphs rather than shown throughout the book how the world was developed, which I could usually ignore if it wasn’t a recurrent thing that took me out of the story itself.

Overall, strong concepts and just not the book for me, though I wish the author all the success in the future and am sure that this book will appeal to other readers.