I tend to have mixed feelings about modern fairytales. Having grown up on the Grimm Brothers variety, I find that many of the ones I read miss the mark; they are too clean, too neat, with packaged morals and little subtlety. Raised by Eva Adderley (Campfire Press) avoids these pitfalls and is truly wonderful adult modern fantasy.
Raised follows Sadie Masonson shortly after her father, Arthur, has died. He abandoned her in their home village of the Liminal Place when he moved into the forest to live with a colony of bears — bears that eventually killed and ate him. Her difficulty processing their complex relationship is heightened by the arrival of the wolf woman Ylfa, mourning the death of her own mother, and the sudden integration of Sadie’s girlfriend into her magical world.
Pressure only grows as the town and spirits of the forest need Sadie to write her father’s eulogy, attempting to force her through stages of grief she is not ready to face. The novel’s title encapsulates the complexity of her experience and sense of self, pitting nature and nurture against each other with a magical backdrop.
First and foremost, Raised is strikingly funny. It keys into a subtle but bizarre type of humor, rare and refreshing (reminiscent of Welcome to Night Vale, for those who are familiar). The book features an overly handsome milkman, dramatic tension around deli meat and self-referential asides that border on being meta. Raised is a novel that knows exactly what it is and takes joy in itself, making it an absolute pleasure for the reader to experience.
Despite its rich humor, the novel is also heartwrenchingly tragic. It is a fairytale about grief, making it a rare standout within its genre. Loss and tragedy are near-constants across folk tales and fantasy, but Raised is one of the few that makes these thematic elements central to its plot. It takes a nuanced interest in examining the trauma at the core of the fantastical.
This is not a story about a woman who goes on a magical journey after something awful happens; Adderley subverts this as an expectation, and instead roots the reader in the traumatic event. Sadie’s experience is not a journey, but forced stillness. She is repeatedly frozen in place by her inability to process her grief while magical things happen around her. Sadie is not a classic hero, but a character exploring the complexity of her relationships and struggling to understand herself.
Raised pays homage to various cornerstones of the fairytale genre, honoring tropes without ever becoming trite. Wishes, toads and things needing to come in threes are all clichés made fresh in Adderley’s hands. These fairytale motifs appear among dance clubs, junky cars, neon lights and other strategic anachronisms. The novel increasingly juxtaposes the disorienting and the familiar, creating just enough cognitive dissonance to feel otherworldly.
I found Raised to be equal parts joyful and mournful, walking along fine genre lines without ever feeling tired.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2026 issue.
