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Book: “Greenteeth” by Molly O’Neill
Publishing Info: Orbit, February 2025
Where Did I Get this Book: from the publisher!
Where Can You Get this Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | IndieBound
Book Description: Beneath the still surface of a lake lurks a monster with needle sharp teeth. Hungry and ready to pounce.
Jenny Greenteeth has never spoken to a human before, but when a witch is thrown into her lake, something makes Jenny decide she’s worth saving. Temperance doesn’t know why her village has suddenly turned against her, only that it has something to do with the malevolent new pastor.
Though they have nothing in common, these two must band together on a magical quest to defeat the evil that threatens Jenny’s lake and Temperance’s family, as well as the very soul of Britain.
Review: This book was a bit of a roller-coaster ride as far as my experience reading it goes. It started off great, with one of my favorite aspects of the book coming to the forefront right away. That being the unique voice of Jenny Greenteeth. The first quarter of the story is fairly closely tied to Jenny’s own narration of what her life has been, what her unique perspective on morality entails, and various other points of interest. While not a lot of action is necessarily taking place, the strength of her narrative voice and unique perspective easily held my interest.
Unfortunately, things became a bit more complicated when our second main character was introduced, Temperance, a witch who had been condemned to death by drowning and tossed into Jenny’s lake. While Jenny’s own story had been unspooled through her interesting narration, Temperance seems to simply word-vomit her entire history in a few pages’ time. It was frankly a bit baffling, as the author had demonstrated a more subtle approach to storytelling before. But here, not only was all of Temperance’s story presented in the most info-dumping-manner possible, but it also threw me out of the story due to the simple fact that no one could possibly talk like this!
From there, it was a bit more of a struggle to become fully invested in the story once again. As I mentioned, the pacing itself is quite slow throughout. In the beginning, with the focus tightly drawn in on Jenny, this worked fine. But as the story continued, I began to struggle. This became especially difficult when the plot seemed to devolve into a string of fetch quests, each as predictable as the last. And to top it off, the story resolved in a way that was a bit predictable in the most disappointing way. I don’t want to spoil it, and there isn’t anything inherently wrong with the story going the way that it did. But I had been hopeful initially that the author was telling a more wholly unique tale, rather than tying it back into familiar source material.
Overall, this was an ok read. There was a lot of potential, especially with the strength of the narrator, but the pacing and plotting became muddled with a string of mundane side quests and resolved in a disappointingly predictable manner. This last point, especially, is particularly subjective, so other readers may appreciate what this book has to offer in this regard more than I did! I do think it’s worth checking out, however, based on Jenny herself.
Rating 7: Jenny herself was a fantastic narrator, but she was let down by lackluster side characters and side quests.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Greenteeth” can be found on this Goodreads list: Botanical and Horticultural Horror
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