Not Good for Maidens

 
 
Not Good for Maidens
by Tori Bovalino
Page Street
2022

 

 

Not Good for Maidens is a YA fantasy retelling of Christina Rosetti's 19th century poem The Goblin Market. Most of the book takes place at some point in the 2000s or 2010s, with flashbacks to events 18 years earlier, so maybe in the 1980s or 90s.

 
Let's start in the past. British teen May succumbs to the temptation to enter the annual Goblin Market, bad things happen to her there, her sister Laura enters to rescue her, and the two girls are shipped off to live with their estranged father in America, where Laura almost immediately gets pregnant.

 
In the present, Laura's now teenage daughter Louisa is looking forward to the annual visit of her other aunt, Neela, who's only a year older than her, and who she loves like a sister. But Neela does not come visit - she too has become trapped in the Goblin Market. Laura rushes off to try to save her, and May and Lou soon follow. 

 
As far as Louisa knew, she lived in a mundane world, so the revelation that magic is real, goblins are real and dangerous, and her family members are all witches comes as quite a shock. Laura fails at her rescue and gets injured, and so, inevitably, it's up to Lou to enter the Market to save them both.

 
As the present day events unfold, we keep following May in flashback as well. We learn why she went in, and what happened to her there. Both May and Louisa reach points where seemingly their only hope is to trust a goblin and hope they aren't being deceived, despite all the warnings they've both gotten that goblins can't be trusted and always try to trick you.

 
One thing Bovalino does well, and that makes the YA designation appropriate, I think, is to portray the overwhelming intensity of teenage emotion. The desire to enter the Market is a wanting, a longing so intense that you give in even as you know it's a mistake to do so. This isn't quite explicitly identified as being the same as the desire for sex, but also, it clearly is even if Bovalino doesn't literally say so. May's emotions, as she considers going in, in the past, sound a lot like accounts I've read of what it felt like to want sex as a young woman before abortion was legal, to know it's a terrible risk, potentially a life-altering, even life-ending risk, but want it anyway. The goblins lurk outside teenage girls' windows, beckoning them 'come buy, come buy, come buy,' like the real life adult men who start propositioning girls the moment they hit puberty.

 
This makes Louisa an interesting protagonist. She's asexual, and also feels no desire to go to the Market (except to save Neela.) She can't understand why anyone ever goes in, when they know the dangers, in the same way that the ace author of a nonfiction book I'm reading remembers when her high school friend got pregnant, and she couldn't understand why her friend didn't just not have sex. On the other hand, because Lou is the main character, Bovalino doesn't explore the blend of emotions that lead the others into danger as much as she might, though May's perspective helps.

 
Bovalino's writing really shines once we get into the Market. The goblins are all deeply inhuman, with a blend of plant-like and animal-like features. The space of the market is full of tempting fruits and wines, but also human body parts sold like produce. Anyone who stays too long will be killed. Bovalino is very attentive to the intoxicating but sickening blend of smells. The market space is a dungeon, a maze of connected underground rooms that seem to shift position to draw you deeper. It's halfway between Labyrinth and Pan's Labyrinth. It would make a good model for a D&D setting.

 
The original Goblin Market was about sexual peril too - the fear that girls would leave the countryside, visit the city, and in pursuit of their own pleasure and own autonomy, end up 'ruined' by an unwed pregnancy, or worse, be kidnapped, raped, or trafficked. 

 
In this sense, the book suffers from being YA, because while May and later Neela experience the Market like high school girls at a college party where they've been given spiked drinks and the mood has just taken a bad turn, Bovalino also still portrays the goblins as fundamentally rule-abiding and fair, and escape without permanent harm is still possible to someone clever enough. It's affirming to see Laura and later Louisa save the day, but the happy ending feels false. It's not that easy in real life. Real danger doesn't follow any rules, and can't always be avoided, no matter how hard you try. And the trauma of bad things happening, which felt so present at the beginning of the book, seems a little too easy to get over by the end.