I’m here all day long for T. Kingfisher’s aging, aching protagonists, with bad knees and big hearts and a well-honed sense of doom. The plot is a very loose retelling of The Goose Girl, minus princesses and kings and plus a conniving, murderous, sorceress mother. Evangeline, aka Doom, is determined to marry herself and her trapped, obedient daughter to the highest bidders in proper Regency-esque fashion, plans thwarted when she encounters a squire’s spinster sister who sees her for exactly who she is. There’s a coterie of women to the rescue: the no-nonsense Hester, the ruthless Imogene, the enchanting Penelope, and eventually Doom’s daughter Cordelia herself.
It’s not rah-rah feminism so much as it is changing the terms for who we deem worthy of consideration, agency, and power in these stories. In T. Kingfisher fashion, that includes the animal world as well. I’d happily read a whole series of Hester, her geese, and her friends (including Richard) living their best life and thwarting monsters in whatever form they take.