REVIEW: Barefoot in the Wind

[feather_ghyll]

Barefoot on the Wind: Zoe Marriott, Walker Books, 2016

We meet Hana, the teenage heroine, successfully hunting for her family. But she is hunting alone, which is rare for the hunters of her village, and we slowly learn that the village consensus is that her family is ill fated. More to the reader’s concern, Hana is – well, one is never meant to diagnose a mental illness in a fictional character, and it isn’t clinical depression, but she carries great despair around with her, a hollowness, which we gradually learn is a mix of grief and guilt. Things are not right in her family.

Indeed, things are not right in Hana’s village. It is in decline, cut off from the outside world due to what we slowly learn is a curse. In a kingdom where the Moon is worshipped as a deity, the night of the dark of the moon is believed to be the time when dark magic is at its strongest, and one by one for a century, villagers have been called out of their beds into the Dark Wood from whence they never return.

Hana’s family has suffered grievously from such losses, but of course it happens again, and, having not reread the blurb at the back of the book, I was eagerly anticipating whether it would be a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast, because Marriott has riffed off fairy tales in the last couple of books by her that I’ve read.

Like ‘Shadow on the Moon’, this is set in a version of Japan. (Japanish?) Maybe it’s exoticism on my part, but I’d rather enjoyed reading stories that traditionally have a northern European setting transplanted to a very different Asian culture, something in the vein of Lian Hearn’s books, although the portentous author’s note references Tolkien, and states the ‘realm’ is ‘called Tsuki no Hikari no Kuni, or the “Moonlight Lands”’ and should not be thought to reference a specific period in Japan’s history.

Anyway, this is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Hana has to be brave, go to the Dark Wood and face a beast who is like a Siberian tiger on steroids. She survives, just, thanks to a mysterious healer, and finds herself in a magical maze, unable to remember how she got there, but aware of a sense of urgency to get better that she can’t understand. Because the first chapters have been so strong and Hana has her own issues with herself, her family and her village, the slow reveal of the truth about the man she comes to think of as a friend, as well as other mysteries, is a subplot. The romance is part of a story of physical and emotional healing.

I found it a page turner, certainly (I stayed up some fifty minutes after my usual bedtime to finish it.) There are a lot of descriptions, and initially I felt they were too much, but they painted vivid pictures in my mind. There’s also a tendency to use very short, staccato sentences, which is a feature of Young Adult books. Some of it is understandable, such as the repeated warnings Hana ‘hears’, but it’s used as a reversal at the end of a section or chapter too often, and comes off as glib.

Hana, like her father and, has the gift of speaking with trees, which makes it interesting that she names her companion in the maze Itsuki, which means ‘tree’, even though she tends to think of the trees as female. It’s also perhaps notable that ‘Hana’ seems very close to familiar names like ‘Hanna’ or ‘Anna’.

There’s an interesting mix of the idea of a snow maiden, a figure in other fairy tales, with a vengeful spirit called the Yuki-Onna, which, I presume, is a figure from Japanese folklore. The Japanese(ish) culture, from the lullabies Hana knows to the houses with porches and screens are fascinating (and, yes, exotic) for me. Marriott is particularly good on the much repaired clothes and chipped objects the village hasn’t been able to replace for a century. These details also root the story’s fantastic elements, as do Hana’s real and relatable struggles with self-worth and family expectations. I was left wondering about why Hana’s mother didn’t do more about the harmful distance between Hana’s father and his daughter. I also have to say that the very final development didn’t work for me – to explain more would be spoilery – but it’s a shame that the final impression marred a book I’d mostly enjoyed.

[Lightly edited 5/4/25.]