My Throat an Open Grave by Tori Bovalino (Not Good for Maidens) is an alluringly creepy and romantic YA folk horror novel that condemns the zealous push for purity in teen girls.
Seventeen-year-old Leah Jones, town pariah, is blamed when her infant brother is taken by the Lord of the Wood, punisher of "wicked" girls. Her "too religious, too superstitious" town tasks her with reclaiming him. But no girl sent into the woods has ever returned.
Leah, uncertain she will survive, bargains with the Lord when she finds his village: she will write him a song, and he will send the siblings home safely. She vacillates, however, over whether to return to a community that sees her as a "black hole of all the things [she] never became." Complicating that ambivalence, the Lord claims he sent back every young woman who ever confronted him. Leah grapples with whom to believe: the Lord, who knows her "worst" actions but wishes she would treat herself with compassion, or the town that taught her to fear the gentle kindness of a mysterious boy.
The town of Winston is a microcosm of the impossible pressures placed on young women: girls must obey, must never slip. Contrastingly, the Lord's mirthful home represents forbidden freedoms, as does the Lord himself, with whom Leah shares a tantalizing attraction. She also nurtures an unsettling yet tender relationship with the gory ghost of a missing Winston girl. To unravel the mystery of her female predecessors, Leah must combat psyche-damaging ideals of what being a "good" person means in this brilliantly savage indictment of societal judgment. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer