Bitter Greens - Kate Forsyth - ★★★.½

AUTHOR: Kate Forsyth

GENRE: Historical Fantasy, Retelling.

PUBLICATION DATE: March 20, 2025.

RATING: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A three-in-one historical fiction: a Rapunzel retelling, a real-life author’s fictionalised biography, and a witch’s origin story. The scope is thus wide and impressive, but also lengthy and complex. I liked the three stories (to varying degrees) but am not too happy with how they were structured and with the gratuitous adult content. Recommended to historical fiction readers, as long as you are okay with reading dark, R-rated sexual content and violence. (Take this last warning seriously; it gets very disturbing.)

Plot Preview:

1697. Versailles, France. Charlotte-Rose de la Force – always a great teller of stories, now banished by Louis XIV to the convent for going a step too far. She is not prepared for spartan novice life after all the years of palatial luxury, all the more as she isn't even Catholic but one of the persecuted Huguenots. When a fellow nun starts telling her a story to while away time when gardening, Charlotte-Rose finds herself enamoured.

The tale narrated by Sœur Seraphina to Charlotte is of a young Italian girl named Margherita, who was forced away from her parents for a handful of bitter greens and locked up in a tower by La Strega aka Selena Leonelli, who has her own reasons for doing so.

The content is presented as a story-within-a-story format, with Charlotte-Rose telling us her life story in first person, Seraphina narrating Margherita’s story to Charlotte-Rose in third person, and within this narrated story, Selena Leonelli telling her backstory to Margherita in first person. Understood? 👀

This book was first published in 2012, and has been reprinted several times since. The edition I read was published on 20th March 2025.

In all honesty, I grabbed this mainly because the blurb called it a dark retelling of Rapunzel. I haven’t ever read a retelling of this fairy tale and grabbed the chance. The novel does contain Rapunzel’s story but it is so much more than that!

Bookish Yays:

🍷 The little foreword on who actually wrote Rapunzel. I had assumed that it was a German fairy tale because of the Grimm Brothers. Nope!

🍷 The book is divided into multiple sections, each named after a part/type of musical composition. (I couldn’t figure out the reason for this but it was interesting to realise!) Each section begins with an excerpt from a version of Rapunzel by different writers.

🍷 Margherita’s story – The retelling of Rapunzel, though not exactly the same as the Madame de la Force version. Loved how well this retelling combines the fairy tale aspects with the historical setting and also liked the backstory of the long hair. My favourite of the three narratives. I wish it had had greater page space, especially as the book is promoted as a retelling.

🍷 Selena’s story – The shortest of the three tales, and possibly, the toughest to evaluate as it is tragic as well as devious. It’s difficult to decide what to call Selena – a villain or a victim. Either way, it was a powerful narrative.

🍷 The real-life inclusions – amazing! I’m impressed that two of the stories contains true-life content to some extent or the other, even though only one was based on an actual woman.

🍷 The historical content, spanning almost two hundred years and covering buildings, outfits, thought processes, social mores, and actual events. The research clearly shows! I especially loved Charlotte-Rose’s timeline in this regard for its detailed depiction of the Sun King’s autocratic declarations and his philandering behaviour, the general attitude of his courtiers, the persecution of the Huguenots, and the infamous “Affair of the Poisons”.

🍷 Just because Charlotte-Rose is the main heroine doesn’t mean that she is depicted as the victim of her situation. I loved her outspoken character and the honest depiction of her strengths and flaws. From whatever little I could find about her online, it looks like the book is quite precise about her scandalous behaviour.

🍷 The vocabulary! I love it when authors know how to use different words without making them appear like random substitutions from the thesaurus.

🍷 The ending, that links all narratives and also includes a real-life Easter egg. While I had already guessed a part of the reveal, I still liked how things were brought to a smooth close, with happy endings for the fairy tales and a realistic finish to the real-life story.

🍷 The Afterword, which lets us know Charlotte-Rose’s fate after the events of this story. I was quite grateful for this considerate and fascinating inclusion.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🩸 The idea of a triple nested narrative sounds great but it gets tricky as well. The story moves across multiple timelines for the same character, but not at regular intervals. Thus we might get a long section from Charlotte-Rose’s timeline, then a lengthy section from Margherita’s story, then back to Charlotte-Rose for a extended spell, jumping again to Margherita but maybe at another point in time… By the time we return to a character, we might even forget what happened the last time we met that character. A huge test of the memory, this! (If you plan to get to this on audiobook, you better be an avid audio listener. Not for audio newbies.)

🩸 Further to the above, because the three stories are so distinct to each other in tone and setting and era, it feels like we are reading three historical fiction novels at once. Each story is fabulous, but too independent in style to feel like part of the same novel.

🩸 Charlotte-Rose’s story – Gets the most page space as it is the dominant narrative inside which the other two rest. But in impact, it isn’t as strong as the other two ladies’ stories, though it has the most historical details. At times, it feels crammed with too much data.

🩸 The filter-free depiction of the historical periods. The treatment of women in all three timelines is especially frustrating to accept from this 21st century perspective. Moreover, the attitude of the royalty towards women in general, towards the Protestant Huguenots, and towards animals during hunts, are barbaric. These are mostly accurate representations of the time, even if they make for discomfiting reading. HOWEVER, some inclusions were too gratuitous and/or risqué. This MIGHT have been necessary in certain scenes such as those involving sexual assault, but the rest of the times, I found the writing become needlessly graphic (whether in terms of violence or sexual content.) One particular racy scene stretched on for multiple pages!

🩸 The pacing is inconsistent. As this is a character-driven novel, a slow pace is expected. But some events go by quickly and others take their own sweet time to move ahead. For such a lengthy book, this random tempo gets tedious.

🩸 La Strega’s first-person narrative isn't too convincing as a verbal recollection, being too detailed. I loved the content of her storyline, but it might have worked better as an independent narrative instead of being framed as a conversational infodump by her to Margherita.

All in all, I am impressed by the concept, the research, the characters, and most of all, the triple historical bonanza. I just wish that the nested narrative structure had been better planned, and that the writing had toned down on the unnecessary “telling” of the historical cruelty towards women and animals. The fairy tale itself was disturbing, as was the fate of women under Louis XIV. There was no call for adding more darkness through unwarranted cruelty. Moreover, if the book is being promoted as a retelling, it might attract YA fairytale lovers as well, and many of the scenes are inappropriate for the younger YA segment. There should have been a clear warning in the blurb/cover about the R-rated stuff.

I am slightly torn over my rating for this book. The concept and research are mindblowing enough, and many of my Nays stem from my preferences. However, my reading experience did get much affected by the distressing adult scenes, so I shall be rounding my rating downwards wherever applicable.

My thanks to Allison & Busby for providing the DRC of “Bitter Greens” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.