I liked this a lot! It was a good mix of fantasy and horror, and I liked that it didn't paint all goblins as evil. I also liked that it was partially set in Boston haha. I'm not usually a fan of alternating timelines, but I thought that worked really well for this story.

This is a tough one to review because it didn’t work for me but it's hard exactly to pinpoint why. I’ll attempt to break down the goods and the bads as well as I can.

In this book, we follow two timelines Lou, an asexual teenage girl in America who finds that her family might have a big secret when her aunt Neela goes missing. The second follows her other aunt, May, as she explores the mysterious magical Goblin Market, 18 years ago and the fallout from that.

I sometimes have an issue with double timelines because I feel like they can get redundant. The past timeline is answering questions for us that the current timeline is still trying to figure out so in this case, we are reading everything twice. It made the first half of this book move very slowly. Even within this first half, I felt the ideas were repeated over and over again. It felt more like adding to a word count than actual worthy additions to the story.

Once I got to the second half of the book, I still found myself pretty disinterested in the story as a whole. I never understood why anyone would go into the Goblin Market. It felt like it wasn’t made clear enough the ‘pull’ since the one case we really see seems special. But also the magic system was never really made clear or explained properly. The whole separate world felt rather empty, rather than intriguing or mysterious.

Lou herself also felt rather empty. At one point another person describes her as a ‘little moon, just orbiting around others’ (paraphrasing) and that’s exactly what she felt like. I didn’t really understand or know her outside of her relationships with the other characters. Which made her a rather dull lead.

The concept however, is great. Goblins here seemed to be a more brutal version of Fae which is pretty popular right now and being drawn into a mysterious and deadly world is a great lead off. This is the first book I have read with an asexual lead which is wonderful! The writing is good, and even though I complained about redundancy earlier, I did really like the author’s use of lyrical repetition used throughout the story.
Also, this cover is super cool. But yes, this is generally a pass from me.

Thank you for this e arc!

Ok I had pretty high expectations because GOBLIN MARKET. This one was sadly a bit disappointing to me. It is two time periods and stories and sometimes it was confusing. I felt that there was nothing that would actually draw anyone to the goblin market- it made it sort of unrealistic to me that people would go when it was just green skinned goblins and gore. It was less creepy and more just ick descriptions. I think this will appeal to readers but just wasn’t really for me. I was intrigued enough to read on.

An appropriately creepy take on "Goblin Market" with strong Holly Black vibes. Great LGBTQIA+ representation,