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The Knife's Daughter
Your mother needed you to be a prince.
When your father was slain and your mother fled into exile, the prophecy was her only comfort. The child in her belly would be a prince, it said, who would wield his father’s sword, avenge his death and take back his throne. But when the time came, your mother didn’t have a boy.
She had you.
Raised to conceal your body, you take up your father’s sword on your eighteenth birthday and set out to fulfill your destiny as a prince, regardless of your sex. You must travel far from the bamboo forests of the mountains; under the earth and into the sky and over the walls of your father’s palace, where his enemy awaits with a secret you could never have imagined. You will face powerful monsters and painful memories as you struggle to complete a journey that will prove who and what you are.
You are the Knife’s Daughter, and this is a story about you.
When your father was slain and your mother fled into exile, the prophecy was her only comfort. The child in her belly would be a prince, it said, who would wield his father’s sword, avenge his death and take back his throne. But when the time came, your mother didn’t have a boy.
She had you.
Raised to conceal your body, you take up your father’s sword on your eighteenth birthday and set out to fulfill your destiny as a prince, regardless of your sex. You must travel far from the bamboo forests of the mountains; under the earth and into the sky and over the walls of your father’s palace, where his enemy awaits with a secret you could never have imagined. You will face powerful monsters and painful memories as you struggle to complete a journey that will prove who and what you are.
You are the Knife’s Daughter, and this is a story about you.
149 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 8, 2018
15 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 1, 2019
Everywhere I turn there are nine-tailed foxes. I blame Yoon Ha Lee.
This tidy little story mixes Korean folklore with a look at gender expectations.
If you don't mind second-person narration, it is tightly written and gets on with things, as one must do in a novella. No wasted words.
Maybe a bit of YA focus, as our hero(ine) grows up, a girl raised as a boy, and discovers herself.
You got yer basic You Must Overcome Three Challenges, but that's fine with me. They were good challenges and well handled. And it even has a pretty satisfactory ending.
This tidy little story mixes Korean folklore with a look at gender expectations.
If you don't mind second-person narration, it is tightly written and gets on with things, as one must do in a novella. No wasted words.
Maybe a bit of YA focus, as our hero(ine) grows up, a girl raised as a boy, and discovers herself.
You got yer basic You Must Overcome Three Challenges, but that's fine with me. They were good challenges and well handled. And it even has a pretty satisfactory ending.
August 27, 2018
This book was fine. I don't know if it could have gone longer and been fine, but there was nothing wrong, many nice things, but nothing outstanding about it. Feels a bit like a plot hat could have been expanded with more detail and dialogue, but it doesn't feel lacking.
Hunh, this doesn't feel like a great review. Nothing bad, it was pleasant to read isn't a ringing endorsement, either. Not sure why it was shelved adult fiction, since it seems nicely YA w/o romance (happily, since I get tired of that), except maybe it's not YA precisely because... well, the idea of gender exploration is stated on the back cover and I don't thnk it's actually YA enough for _that_, more of a middle-grade in that regard. But I didn't pick it up because of that, but because it was a novella, so that didn't disappoint me, but just felt like it was an mostly irrelevant item on the back cover. Very much a fairytale, actually.
Hunh, this doesn't feel like a great review. Nothing bad, it was pleasant to read isn't a ringing endorsement, either. Not sure why it was shelved adult fiction, since it seems nicely YA w/o romance (happily, since I get tired of that), except maybe it's not YA precisely because... well, the idea of gender exploration is stated on the back cover and I don't thnk it's actually YA enough for _that_, more of a middle-grade in that regard. But I didn't pick it up because of that, but because it was a novella, so that didn't disappoint me, but just felt like it was an mostly irrelevant item on the back cover. Very much a fairytale, actually.
September 29, 2018
I enjoyed The Knife's Daughter. It's a quick read that presents a more personal and nuanced version of the 'girl who is forced to pretend to be a boy' twist on the traditional quest fairy tale and an exploration of gender roles in this kind of storytelling.
The whole thing is wrapped up in Korean folklore, though like most stories of this kind it would have worked just as well in any other 'dressing' because it's really about gendered expectations and the impact they can have on young people rather than an attempt to extend a specific cultural tradition.
Once you adjust to Coletti's choice to tell the story from a second-person perspective and the problems that creates in terms of telling you how you feel about everything rather than letting you decide for yourself, it moves along at a fast pace and, with one disappointing exception, wraps itself up very neatly.
The whole thing is wrapped up in Korean folklore, though like most stories of this kind it would have worked just as well in any other 'dressing' because it's really about gendered expectations and the impact they can have on young people rather than an attempt to extend a specific cultural tradition.
Once you adjust to Coletti's choice to tell the story from a second-person perspective and the problems that creates in terms of telling you how you feel about everything rather than letting you decide for yourself, it moves along at a fast pace and, with one disappointing exception, wraps itself up very neatly.
September 28, 2018
An interesting, experimental novella, dealing with questions of gender and destiny and fairy tales. Gloriously not Euro-centric (as you can probably tell from the cover). The second person POV took some getting used to, but I think it worked in the end.
January 9, 2022
A nice folktale that explores gender roles.
January 22, 2025
A fairy tale with some lovely language and some interesting gender going on. I think a novella was the perfect size for this. Content warnings for attempted rape and, of course, misgendering.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews