Maria Turtschaninoff's feminist fantasies

I wrote about Maria Turtschaninoff's Maresi many years ago (almost a decade!), not long after I first read it. Like many books, my impression of Maresi has changed somewhat over the years. After reading its sequel Naondel, I remember thinking how Maresi had been a little childish compared to Naondel's dark story. The basis for this was mostly because Maresi reminded me of Tamora Pierce's works, which I had read as a preteen, and I had felt that I would have loved Maresi as a teen. And somehow this morphed into a perception that Maresi was only a "good" book, not much more. That somehow cemented in my mind when I read and adored Maresi Red Mantle (or just Red Mantle), the third and final book in the series. The leap to no-disclaimers-needed love retroactively turned Maresi into a lesser work in my mind.

I carried this wrong perception with me for years, until a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to reread it.

But let's take a step back for a moment. I decided to reread Maresi not out of simple curiosity, but because I'm currently reading Maria Turtschaninoff's more recent book - Tangled Roots in its English translation (though I'm reading the translation to Hebrew). This novel is quite different from the Red Abbey Chronicles, with its feminist YA framing. Tangled Roots is instead a more mainstream sort of work of fiction. It's not quite a novel, comprised as it is of snippets from the lives of one(ish) sprawling family over several hundreds of years, specifically rooted to a particular patch of land. On the one hand, there are leaps and jumps between characters and eras, and each story is typically distinct. On the other hand, there are clearly threads that tie between the stories such that it's more similar to a family epic than just a discrete collection of short stories. It's less overtly feminist than the Red Abbey Chronicles (to begin with, it centers some boys and men, though most of the protagonists are women), and only less fantastical if you decide to ignore the actual text. It somehow feels like something about its more mature style makes it easier to pretend that the book isn't just as much a feminist fantasy as Maresi.

Tangled Roots - novel, epic, story collection, whatever you want to call it - is a good book so far. I read half of it fairly quickly, and then felt like I needed a short break, not because it's a bad book, but because it was shifting gears a bit as it leapt through the 19th century. I wanted to give it space. But I didn't want too much space. I kept thinking about Turtschaninoff's writing, about that love that I felt for Red Mantle, and the way I'd hunted for any news of a new book from her before learning of Tangled Roots. I wished I had my copy of Red Mantle with me (it's on the other side of the world), but I instead found that my library carried Maresi as an ebook. So I reread it. And reader, I'm sure you'll be shocked, I loved it.

I remembered little more than a sort of stereotypical "dark feminist fantasy", but Maresi has a lot more depth than that. The story is certainly dark in many parts, but a lot is also just about the communities that women build to support each other. This is a theme that appears in Tangled Roots as well, though to a lesser degree. Maresi also lingers on faith more than I remembered, where there is little outright magic in the world rather than the power of the goddesses. This too appears in Tangled Roots, with the magical qualities of the land tying into questions of faith in the "old ways" versus Christianity.

The one thing that surprised me is that I haven't managed to feel a connecting thread between Turtschaninoff's writing itself in Maresi and Tangled Roots. Part of it may be that I'm reading the books in different languages, but I think it's more than that (especially considering how many authors I have felt as having a continuous voice, regardless of the language in which I read their book). Tangled Roots feels a lot more confident in its writing, with a sort of depth permeating its different stories and the sinews that connect between them. Could Tangled Roots work for younger adults? Certainly. I have yet to encounter anything in it that doesn't work for teens. But its tone and its atypical structure just feel fundamentally different from Maresi, for all the other similarities.

There is no consensus about what happens when authors make the jump from YA to adult fiction. Sometimes, the more "mature" book is lauded even when there's little actual difference between the author's YA work and the newer, "adult" book (other than maybe the age of the protagonist, and sometimes not even that). Sometimes, the author is dismissed for trying to elevate themselves inappropriately. Maria Turtschaninoff should surely fall into the previous category, with her tangled tale of men, women, and children (young adults included!) who live and breathe on a particular patch of Finnish land. The feminist fantasy may be more muted, more "appropriate" for a wider audience, easier to generalize, but it's not really so far removed from the Red Abbey Chronicles. And ultimately, I continue to hope that all of her books find more readership and look forward to whatever she writes next.

Happy WITMonth 2026!

It never ceases to amaze me just how long WITMonth has been happening. With my limited online presence these days, it's even more surprising to see how people celebrate WITMonth. I was invited to join in on an Instagram WITMonth TBR reading challenge of sorts (a monthlong book "passport"; it's cute!), and as usual I'm tagged in many, many posts as the month begins. As in the past few years, I feel somewhat detached from it all. My own reading continues as it always does, of course, but there's a feeling of hollowness in the performance. I don't want to show off my beautifully curated TBR. I don't have a beautifully curated TBR, or any clear sort of TBR to be perfectly honest.

So what does WITMonth look like to me, in 2026? I touched on this a bit in my last post, but here are some more details:

• I'm slowly working my way in updating a new releases list for US-based publications from 2025 through August 2026, on the WIT Bookshop.org page. I still have a lot more publishers and books to add, but if you're curious, feel free to check it out.
• I haven't yet updated womenintranslation.org, because life is a lot. I hope to get to it soon, but no guarantees.
• I might upload a post or two on Instagram, but I have found myself tired of the overly visual format. I want to be able to share thoughts and write words, and that's increasingly difficult in a medium that favors a certain type of brevity and imagery. I'm not going to make every photo into a video, or add a musical background. Why would I do that?
• I plan to read books. I'm already reading books, in fact. I'm sort of always reading at least one or two or five books by women writers in translation.
• I might write a post or two here, too. I feel like I'm testing the waters in terms of my own ability to wade back into this pool. There's a lot of weight here that I have no intention of discussing right now, but it's not as easy as it might sound.

I'm currently reading three books by women in translation:

1. Tangled Roots by Maria Turtschaninoff, translated from Swedish into Hebrew by Dana Caspi (the English edition is translated by Annie Prime). I am enjoying it quite a bit, reading it slowly and appreciating its warmth and depth.
2. All the Women Inside Me by Jana Elhassan, translated from Arabic into English by Michelle Hartman. This has been my "train" read for the past few days, and I'm finding it a deeply sad, unsettling book. The very meditative, aimless style feels a little distracting to me, but I understand what the book is trying to do.
3. Fire From the Sky by Moa Backe Åstot, translated from Swedish by Eva Apelqvist. This is my "bedtime" book, since it's on my eReader and I can read it in an otherwise dark room without waking the baby. It's a nice reminder of what I always say, that there is not WIT genre. Women in translation writing all sorts of types of works exist across every genre, age designation, plot type, etc.

Will I finish all this month? Who knows. Will I read other books? Almost certainly. Will it be nicely presentable? Almost certainly not. But... WITMonth can live without me, at this stage. I'd rather just read some good books.

WITMonth, more than a decade later

What does WITMonth look like in the 2020s?

In 2013, I was a tired university student, procrastinating on a tedious physics homework assignment while studying in the math department library. I had downloaded the Three Percent database of literary translations, and was curious to check whether a gender imbalance I'd recently discovered in my own reading was something systemic or an unconscious bias on my own end. I discovered that women writers were actually wildly underrepresented in literary translations. Later, as my own interest in this subject grew, I backed up that mostly qualitative, thoughtful post with "the one with charts", showing a breakdown by languages and encompassing a much more rigorous review of the Three Percent database. I started hosting WITMonth, my reading interests shifted, and the women in translation project became a centerpiece of this blog and later a dedicated Twitter account and website.

Years passed.

I graduated from my undergraduate degree. Then my Master's. Then my PhD. I moved countries and began my postdoc. I got married. I had a baby. My posts on this blog slowed, then stopped. I logged off Twitter basically for good. I logged off Instagram mostly for good. I kept reading, but it felt different, like I was stumbling across books without the added expectations of blogging or being "WITMonth Founder". Things changed and things stayed the same.

When the 10-year anniversary of WITMonth rolled around, I kept thinking to myself: Okay, how can I make this year BIGGER and BETTER? WITMonth was happening with or without me at this stage, and indeed it felt like Bookstagram and BookTok influencers were doing it way better than I ever could, so what was the point? I saw Instagram posts with neat, clean graphics, "kindly provided by the publisher" books, and gorgeous aesthetic backgrounds getting 300, 400 likes. The videos were somewhat more inscrutable, since I don't have TikTok (and have no intention of getting it), but I was hearing reports about popular accounts discussing WITMonth and the importance of reading #womenintranslation. I'd always hoped that the popular bloggers would adopt WITMonth into their other types of literary activism, so this felt like a win.

And suddenly, I felt superfluous. Like a parent watching their child grow and no longer need their help with every little thing, nobody seemed to notice that I didn't put out a list of WITMonth new releases. Or then that I didn't post anything about my own WITMonth reading (even though it continued, as usual). Or that I didn't update the Women in Translation website. I stopped engaging with social media and just... faded into the background.

Except, of course, my interest never waned. It was only my sense of how to engage in WITMonth activism that shifted. I found myself - as ever - trying to read more broadly, to read outside of the established texts or the books that everyone seemed to be discussing (it helped that I no longer saw all of the publisher-promoted content or hype on social media), to think about what questions really mattered when talking about women writers from around the world in 2024, 2025, and now 2026. As my own life changed, I also wondered about literature that reflected some of those changes: books about pregnancy or motherhood took on a new meaning (though I didn't actually shift to reading more of them), as did books about all sorts of other heavy topics. I found that my reading was gradually shifting back to being a much broader mix of genres, which inevitably also brought back a lot more English-language literature and nonfiction.

But August approaches, as it does every year. And I find myself wanting to talk about women writers in translation.

It's true that since 2013, the landscape has changed rather starkly. I am constantly in awe of this post from the Three Percent blog, that so clearly shows the difference from 2008 through 2023, with women in translation now at near-parity levels overall (in new fiction and poetry). I am humbled to think that I had some part in that. Whether I'll ever play such a role again remains to be seen (I suspect not), but the fact that there already has been a major cultural shift in the publishing world. Yes, there are the publishers who still bury their heads in the sand and ignore their abysmal track records, but there are also several publishers at this point who literally only publish women writers in translation. When I started this project, it was rare for me to find a book by a woman writer in translation (even the most accessible, "normie" European writer) at an ordinary big-name or indie bookstore. Today, I find them everywhere, often translated from several different languages (French, Spanish, Danish, German, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Arabic are often prominent on bookstore shelves; it helps that there have been four WIT Nobel laureates since this project began) and spanning across continents. There are books from the biggest publishers and books from tiny independent presses. WIT are everywhere.

And yet some things haven't changed. Or maybe they've changed, but still demonstrate a huge gap.

There are still languages biases, of course. Indian languages have always been the ones that surprise me most, largely because there are actually a lot of translations into English from Indian languages, but these are published or marketed somewhat exclusively on the subcontinent. These books simply don't make their way out of India. There are biases that reflect smaller language markets, too: It's not that no books are published in Hausa, and yet it is extremely hard to find examples of works translated into English. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: It's rarely a situation of "This thing doesn't exist!", and more "This thing isn't very common!"

My end-goal remains the same, though. I want these stories to be accessible. I wrote on the WIT website "Every story counts" many years ago, and returned to that message for WITMonth this year. It's not just about having "more", having numerical parity, wonderful as that is (AND IT IS!). It's about recognizing that different stories and voices bring with them their own value. That was the idea behind the DailyWIT or so many other projects I ran over the years. I'll be returning to that this year, but recognizing that it's not just linguistic or country-based diversity. It's genre. It's politics (or lack thereof). It's books that are as suited to my baby as to me. It includes books that I find incredibly boring and it includes books that I find infuriating or damaging and it includes books that I adore beyond all measure. Every. story. counts.

Let's see if I can do it justice this year.