summer and bird are sisters. summer is 12 and sensible and bossy; bird is 9 and strange like their mother, who is secretly the queen of birds. yes THE QUEEN OF BIRDS!!! their mom is basically a birdselkie and her feathers and crown were stolen thirteen years ago, and so she raised her daughters human. summer and bird don’t know about all this weird bird stuff until their mother finds her feathers and flies away from them for her kingdom and her freedom
and they follow her into another world
and that world is ruled exclusively by girls, has only ever had queens. i mean there is this groovy jesus phoenix but here the girls are christ: christ and judas and eve and mary all together, traitor and redeemer and savior and sacrifice
(this book is a fairytale like many fairytales in that it is not interested in subtlety. it is a girl walking alone through snow and fire, a girl crawling into the mouth of a snake, a girl turning into something strange.)
and these girls are stumbling through all these mythologies hungry and afraid and angry— you know, you are angry at your mother and your sister for being human but also for being birds (for being flawed when they’re supposed to be good, for being inaccessible when you want to hold them), for being yours and for being their own, for hurting you and leaving you and letting you hurt and leave them
and summer and bird could both be the next queen, both want to be the queen, but what does queenship even mean, to two girls who are small and wild and just slightly inhuman, who curl against each other to sleep in the cold forest night, who face each other on a howling plain with a million furious birds swirling around them
tw: mention of disordered eating in a minor character