This was an interesting novel, I am still not sure what was happening to the world after the catastrophe, or why Tasha and Heather were having the visions.

Overall, it was an interesting story and I would read more books written by Amanda Leduc in the future.

While beautifully written, I felt lost at times throughout this narrative. For the first 150+ pages I had a very hard time feeling like the centaur story and the human one were in any way related. Even though there are connections it just felt a bit forced. It comes together in the end but this weighs on me as keeping this from a five star review; and I'm dropping it to a three from an almost-four.
I feel like I should say more but honestly it was just so blah for the first three-quarters of the book. It's just too much to take before the good parts come through. And the romance is so forced. I wish I loved this; I really do. But I just didn't engage me the way it should have.

Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.

With the main character having a physical disability, the author brought a fresh take to dystopian literature. I enjoyed the tie in to classic mythology stories.

The Centaur's Wife was not an engaging read for me. I failed to connect with any of the characters, finding the main character especially standoffish and unlikable. I also felt that the story was put together wrong, and I had a hard time following at some points. I think that the concept could be worked on but the way it was put together made the book really hard for me to read.

Fantasy is not my usual genre choice. In fact, I can probably count on a hand how many I have read. I was drawn to picking The Centaur's Wife up because I absolutely adored Leduc's non-fiction, Disfigured (I actively tell everyone to read it).

I wasn't too sure going into this one how it would go for me. It did take me a bit to get into because it was a lot for me to take in. Leduc is such an insightful and talent writer. The way in which she weaves the story components together is so well crafted. The story and themes are unique and make you think about a lot of topics.

Though there is darkness to this book, there is also hope. There is survival on an individual and community level. The alternating chapters of interwoven fairytales add a truly imaginative piece to the story. Though I didn't always understand what exactly was happening, I still appreciated the read. I enjoyed getting to know Heather in her past and the present to better understand her thoughts as the story unfolded.

I also appreciate that Leduc brings disability into the spotlight with grace and understanding. It is not explicitly said, but you feel it is there. And for that, I appreciate Heather (and Leduc) that much more.

I understand that this may be a book that readers either love or hate, but I strongly encourage readers to pick it up and give it a read. You never know, it may just surprise you. I guarantee there are going to be a lot of great reviews coming down the line for it.

Book review ✨
The Centaur's Wife by Amanda Leduc
Rate 3⭐️ (CawPile rating 6.2)

C- characters - 5
A - atmosphere - 6
W - writing Style -9
P - plot - 8
I - intrigue - 6
L - logic - 6
E - enjoyment - 4

Thank you @randomhouseca, penguinhouseca and @netgallet for this ARC!

I was hoping to like this book, but the book just failed me. Maybe I was expecting too much?

The one thing that I liked about this book was the writing style! Other things were boring to me, probably because the book wasn’t for me. I didn’t connect with any of the characters. I was trying to connect somehow with the story but eventually, I just wanted to finish the book.

I feel really bad for writing low rating review. I hope that author will write the second book about something different and I will gladly give a second chance to the author, especially because of the writing style!

Yes, I can recommend this book to everyone who loves Fantasy fiction, Magical Realism and Science fiction.

We loved this book and discussed it on the most recent episode (see Season 5 Episode 3) . Highly recommend.

I'm so torn by this book. Parts of it I absolutely loved and parts of it left me confused. I loved the concept so much, along with the creativity, and the writing is good. Overall, though, I don't think this book is right for my subscription box.

With fairytales and magic woven into this novel, cataclysmic events force Heather and her newborns to hide from the destruction. As survivors, they approach a legendary mountain, still green and full or promise. Mesmerizing and seductive, this is well worth the read.

Fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, dystopian all of these could be used to describe Amanda Leduc's "The Centaur's Wife". A beautiful yet tragic blend of fairy tale and reality, an overwhelming feeling of grief drives the story - grief for what might have been but hope for what might yet be possible. The story encompasses generations of man and centaur whose lives intertwine in various ways. I recommend for lovers of magical fantasy and fairy tales. It will not disappoint.
#TheCentau'sWife#NetGalley

What a beautiful, strange, and wondrous book! It's a post-apocalyptic dystopian fairy tale where nature is somehow the villain and it's a study in how grief can warp us. It's baffling and comforting and familiar in its oddness. Absorbing and confusing and yet, hopeful in the end.

THE CENTAUR'S WIFE is part fairy tale, part post-apocalyptic story, part champion of characters with disabilities - and maybe one of the most unique books I've read so far this year! After a meteor shower causes her city to descend into chaos, Heather, a new mother of twins who also has a physical disability, struggles to survive along with the other residents of the city. She finds comfort in the neighbouring mountain, although the city's other inhabitants are wary of it. (Incidentally, this mountain seems to not have been harmed in the catastrophic meteor shower, whereas the people living in the city struggle to grow food in order to survive.) Sprinkled throughout the novel are fairy tales that mirror or reveal further insights on the present-day post-apocalyptic part of the story. I suppose it's not a spoiler to say that fantastical beings exist in this world, although I won't explain how the real and fantasy elements work together in the book!
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Like I said in my last post, I really enjoyed reading this book, especially after having read Amanda Leduc's latest work of nonfiction, DISFIGURED, which critiques representations of disability and illness in fairy tales. I thought THE CENTAUR'S WIFE was a great follow-up to that book, but the novel itself was really interesting to read as well, even just on its own.
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THE CENTAUR'S WIFE comes out today! Thank you to @netgalley and @penguinrandomca for the gifted copy.

I was granted eARC access to The Centaur's Wife via NetGalley, and unfortunately, I wasn't quite able to get my review out before publication day, but better late than never, right? We're still within the first week. We've still got time to send people rushing to purchase in time for the bestseller lists! But in all seriousness, thank you to all involved in granting me this complimentary copy. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

The Centaur's Wife is a whimsical, brutal, dark, heartbreaking, and uplifting blend of storylines that take us from the creation of centaurs to the end of the modern world as we know it. Every piece of the story is full of sadness and joy, love and loss, and somehow most of it winds together to leave us in a cautiously hopeful mindset by the end of the book.

Representation: Visible disabilities (Cerebral Palsy, Cystic Fibrosis), invisible disabilities (depression, anxiety), LGBTQIA relationships, racial/visible minorities

Content warnings: Surgery while awake, pregnancy and infant loss, loss of a parent, disability-focused bullying, firearm violence, suicide, threat of starvation

This is an apocalypse story tied together with fairytales that happen to be true. It's the story of those who survive the end of the world, how the world continues to try to destroy them, and what it takes to keep going. We meet people who are willing to band together and help one another and people who aren't. These people face fear, dwindling supplies from before the event, and the new threat of nature that is literally trying to snuff them out. (Vines that move at a visible rate to reclaim anything and everything, soil that will not produce crops, etc.) Only those who join up together, pool resources and efforts, and lift each other up emotionally are able to survive the first year.

To describe this book as weird would definitely be fair, but not weird in a bad way. It feels experimental, it takes processing, and it probably needs to be read more than once. It's a beautiful blend of science fantasy with magical realism and apocalypse fiction, told from a variety of points of view, and it doesn't care for such constraints as linear time. This book jumps around a lot and this does mean some may find it too confusing to finish, but think those who do will come out the other end having gained something. Gained what? I'm not sure. It feels like it'll be different for everyone.

This is definitely going to be one of those cult following books with a loud fan base who force it on everyone else. Not everyone will like it. Not everyone will get it. Those who do will probably not stop trying to convince everyone who doesn't. In that way, it reminds me of The Night Circus or Piranesi. Those who love it, LOVE it. Those who don't get it don't understand what the fuss is about.

I honestly don't know who to recommend this to, specifically. It isn't quite like anything I've ever read before, other than having that same sense of "not every reader is going to get it" that the books I mentioned above have. Perhaps I'll start there? I would highly recommend this to fans of Erin Morgenstern, or of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. I would also recommend it more broadly to fans of magical realism who don't mind twisty, turny plots and multiple POVs, and to people who liked the concept of gritty end of the world stories like Dies the Fire by S.M. Sterling but want something a little less in-your-face real.

This is a dreamy, dark book with a lot of magic AND it was well-written. The pandemic we're in is no comparison to the destruction in this novel but the way this novel addressed grief & loss & moving forward felt apt for right now.

This is a intelligent read for anyone who loves or is interested in fairy-tales and modern interpretations. The writing is effortless and poetic.

This novel starts out tentatively based in realism, and then steadily grows into magic and fairy tale, until by the end it is almost purely myth.

I read Leduc's Disfigured when it came out a few years ago--I bought a copy for Echo at the release party, and we both loved it. Echo has since made disability a main focus in a number of her art projects, including a strange fishy-monster Little Mermaid comic for art class directly inspired by the book and Leduc's talk at the release. So I was thrilled to see her new novel coming out containing many of the themes she previously explored in non-fiction, and asked for and received a copy from NetGalley.

Aside: NetGalley's copies often suck. I've sometimes received pdfs which I'm sure would be wonderful if I were reading it on a tablet, but I'm not, I'm reading them on my little phone, and even zoomed in as far as I can the print is tiny and it makes my old-lady eyeballs hurt. It takes me forever to read these, and I sometimes abandon them. The Centaur's Wife was worth it, but knowing how forcefully Leduc advocates for accessibilty in all her publications (they are published simultaneously in print and other accessible formats such as braille, audio, etc.), I have to think she's be pissed to know that the netgalley version is such a pita. Anyway. It's a NetGalley release; I received a pdf version in tiny, tiny print in exchange for this review.

The Centaur's Wife is about Heather, a woman with cerebral palsy who survives the end of the world, along with her husband and newborn twin daughters. The initial cause is (or appears to be) asteroid strikes, but as magic grows and the earth becomes alive and not at all disposed to be kind to humans, the initial cause is complicated and mythologized. The main narrative is interspersed both with short fairy-tales by Leduc set in this version of the world, and another storyline about a doctor in a vague historical period who helped to deliver a human woman of her centaur triplets, sired by a horse in human disguise. All three threads slowly converge throughout the novel, and while the story is often dark, the writing is beautiful. The characters are interesting, complicated, and human; questions of frailty of all kinds--disability and otherwise--are raised throughout and shown to give rise to a particular kind of strength.

Strongly recommended, and I'm looking forward already to Leduc's next book.

When I say this book is unlike anything I've ever read, I really mean it. A crazy mix of scifi apocalypse and green fantasy, this story combines the two pretty seamlessly. And that's something I can't say I've read before. A meteor shower that takes out the human world as we know it, centaurs that live on a magical safeguarded mountain, and the most effortless mass murdering of characters I've ever read, this book was strangely very stressful and also very calming at the same time to read. Can you say you've read anything like that before?

Right in the middle of this crazy world is Heather, a girl who's known struggles all her life. Born a little different, her dad was always there for her, telling her fantastic stories of the mountain and it's creatures. After losing him in a freak accident that caused him to fall off of that mountain, everyone thought she was crazy for saying that there were centaurs living up there. She never ended up leaving her home town, becoming an artist and making money that way. There's also Tasha, a doctor, Annie, her wife and nurse, Elyse, a sick girl fighting her way through this apocalyptic nightmare, and B, Heather's husband whom she has twin girls with right at the beginning of the novel just briefly before the meteors take everything out. And weaved in between the chapters are intricate fairy tales, depicting life and death, and everything in between. This book is truly beautiful and a piece of art, in my opinion.

A wild ride from start to finish, this book was everything I could have asked for and more. I say this a lot, but from the description alone I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was sucked in from the moment I started, and I think it's another one of those books that will be stuck in my head for a long time after I've put it down. It had so many twists and turns and stressful moments, like just trying to survive in a world that's trying to choke you out and starve every human it can find to death, families fighting, food is running out, and everything these characters have known has crumbled. On top of that, Heather has twin baby girls in this new horrifying world, a husband she barely knows and frankly only married so that her children would have a father, and she's being haunted by not only the people in her town but the life she once knew with her father, and the creatures she knows exist on the mountain but must stay a secret.

I really found like although the world was so different from our own, everything was so easy to imagine, and I really enjoyed getting to know the fairy tales that Heather was taught as a child for myself. The characters were so lifelike despite these massive differences, and really faced the challenges that they were forced to deal with like anyone would really, even though they had their own demons to deal with while that was happening. A world where plants are very obviously trying to take over, poisonous and scary ones, but I think it really shows that humans are able to persevere through almost anything, though there was a very low percentage left at the end. It was still something.

Really what I'm trying to say is that this book is absolutely one of my new favourites. I would love to grab a copy for myself on my bookshelf so that I can re-read it any time I want, because I think it's just so timeless, that sometime in the near future I will want to re-read it. And if you know me, you know that I'm not usually like that with books. I recommend it to anyone looking for a story of hardship with a fantastic twist on it, who like scifi and apocalypse and mythical creatures, mixed with fairy tales. I would say it's definitely not something for kids despite that, and there are some "mature" scenes with depictions of sexual coercion that could possibly be triggering for some people. But that being said, they're very brief and easy to skip over if you are someone who is triggered by things like that.

(Radioactivebookreviews.wordpress.com)

i liked the unique storytelling aspect and the multiple perspectives of this novel. the mythological aspect of the centaurs intrigued me greatly. i also enjoyed heather and b's relationship. the pacing of the book overall felt a little slow to me, though, but it was still enjoyable!

This is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read but in a delicious way. I wasn’t expecting urban fantasy and dystopian to work so well together but oh boy did they. This heartwarming and heartbreaking and I will read everything Amanda Leduc publishes from now on.

This book is somewhere between a two and a three for me. Some parts were really enjoyable and other parts I just had no interest in.
I could not get into the flow of the story. I guess magical realism just isn't for me.