I read this novella for the indie novella competition, SFINCS. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole. Find out more about the competition here and my team, The WIPs, here!
Daughters of the Blue Moon by Millie Abecassis is a dark fantasy retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, centering on womanhood and queerness, depicting wolves in a unique light and weaving a story of secrets, magic, and stolen agency.
Carmine is a huntress, working for the good people of her hometown alongside her husband. She is skilled and strong but also has a secret weapon: the tattoo on her back, given to her by her witch grandmother to protect her after a wolf attack that had nearly killed her in her childhood. Now, another wolf prowls the forests, taking sheep and terrifying people. Carmine hunts the beast down, but after the victory, encounters a curious she-wolf who seriously wounds her. As Carmine recovers, she experiences a strange dream about singing wolves—a dream she remembers from her childhood as well. And her husband is strangely guarded about that tattoo on her back that this time didn’t shield her from the she-wolf…
From then on, the novella tells the story of Carmine in a dual timeline, showing us what happened to her in the lead-up to the wolf attack in her childhood when she’d gone to visit her sick grandmother, and also the present, as she tries to figure out her mysterious bond with the animals. The central theme is definitely agency here: there are a lot of people keeping a lot of things in secret from Carmine. To find them out, to get control over her life, she needs to grapple with the fact that she doesn’t know the people closest to her as well as she’d thought, and this truly can be life-rending experience. It’s a rude betrayal, when other people decide about one’s own fate, as if they knew better what was good for her, as if she was weak or too dumb to decide herself. Abecassis isn’t afraid to quickly make the connection to the errors of a patriarchal society either: women, at default, are often perceived to be weaker and more vulnerable, and everyone seems to be much more ready to take away the choice of someone like that. Carmine is an accomplished huntress, but still, still isn’t regarded high enough to be able to make her own decisions. Apart from this, consent is another key word as well, as we get to know more about the mystery of these wolves.
Another aspect, namely Carmine’s relation to the she-wolf, veers into a sort of allegory regarding queerness. The ‘otherness’ of the wolves, their outcast nature, how their way of life is abhorred and not understood, is clearly a reference to how many queer people experience their positions in our society. There is also a sniff (pun intended!) of a sapphic story here, but due to the constraints of the length, I felt like it didn’t have time to breathe and remained not much more than an indication and a tool of the plot. It would have been interesting to see more of Carmine’s feelings as she discovers paths and experiences so far hidden from her. I really liked, however, the presentation of how at the end, she couldn’t curse either her husband nor her grandmother for the way her life had turned out, not entirely. Getting free of the traps and lies is a long process, and very complicated, when it involves people, loved ones, we define ourselves around.
A well-thought out plotline and these interesting allusions are certainly very strong points of the work. The writing is capable, and as we get a glimpse into the world (especially the sorts of magic that can be found in it), it felt lived-in as well. My intellectual reading-brain was certainly tickled by all this, but I wish I could have felt with the main character a bit more, and seen her personality shine through more often, however the prose kept me distant from her, even though the emotional layer was clearly very much emphasized in Carmine’s journey. I also felt like the dual timeline storytelling unfortunately did not help to keep up the tension as we reached the ending. In any case, fairy tale retelling fans will delight in the themes and dark twisting of secrets and truths in the novella, and I recommend Daughters of the Blue Moon to them wholeheartedly.
Helyna L. Clove 
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