Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: The Girl on the Stove
AUTHOR: M. Wiklund
PUBLISHER: Less Than Three Press
LENGTH: 61 pages
RELEASE DATE: October 17, 2018
BLURB:
Princess Galina’s father has set her a difficult task: persuade a peasant named Elena to reveal the secrets behind her magical powers. Difficult, and maybe impossible, given that Elena is stubborn to a fault and has no respect for authority—especially the kind that wears a crown. And the more time passes, the less Galina cares about doing her duty and more about simply Elena.
REVIEW:
I’m always game for WLW fairy tales and sapphic princesses. I’m also game for characters with un-pretty flaws—selfish characters, lazy characters, ignorant characters. They provide the best humor and the greatest development. But despite a charming fantasy backdrop, Elena and Galina are simply two unlikable characters involved in a chemistry-free romance within a wafer-thin plot.
Galina is our imperious princess—haughty, spoiled, and arrogant. She breezily looks down on others and has no problem elevating herself. When she’s presented with Elena, a commoner atop a flying stove whose magical telekinesis has caught the eye of the king, we expect she’ll be humbled by the love she feels for a clever peasant. But instead, she remains judgmental and ignorant throughout the entire book, making very few sacrifices that were actually within her power to make. She’s not totally irredeemable, but she’s not super fun to read about, either.
Elena is a confusing character. Her main goal in life is to never do any work. If she denounced “women’s work” as a form of protest, I’d be totally on board—after all, women shouldn’t be the ones to clean up after others all the time. But instead, she just doesn’t want to. She’s happy to sit by and let her harried sisters-in-law do everything around the house, and the only time she will work is when something she wants is in jeopardy. Maybe this is the American in me speaking, but to me, she’s just not an admirable character. She has no real principles. She reasons that she wants freedom rather than being told what to do, but what freedom does she have? She’s given everything by her family, who all work to support her. Her freedom comes at a price that she isn’t even paying herself. Even at the end, when she and Galina get their happily ever after, she’s still avoiding work. I’m all for stubborn women, but Elena’s lack of development is frustrating.
To conclude, I have one main issue with the book. The entire time I was reading, I kept thinking one thing: the stove is a problem. It’s in the title, yet it’s a completely confusing plot device. For most of the story, Elena doesn’t get off her stove, alluding to the idea she can’t, as if she’s been magically shackled to a piece of domestic machinery that she detests. But then, she just hops right off, and that’s that. The stove means nothing. It does nothing. It’s Chekhov’s Stove.
So at the end, what do we have? A useless stove, zero character development, and a story that never takes a foot off the ground. Wiklund can certainly write believable flawed characters, but even the most interesting flawed fictional women need to develop in some way.
RATING: 
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