The Butcher of the Forest

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

I loved Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built. It was a nice warm hug of a book that explored finding meaning in life, our relationship with nature, and how to come to terms with not knowing where a path may lead. I gave it an 89/100.

This book is that book’s evil twin.

Brutal, dark, and often unsettling, Premee Mohamed’s exploration of resistance, authoritarianism, and suppression reads like the very best of the Brothers Grimm. The prose is exquisite, absolutely exquisite. It takes real skill to paint a setting so dark and unsettling while rarely straying into the grotesque—it’s a prime example of letting the reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting. Any author who can completely immerse me in an “alien” landscape is going to score highly.

It’s a fantastic 150 page book. I expected it to be a top five book for me; after all, I read it over a single weekend.

Unfortunately, it’s not 150 pages long, it’s 164. I completely understand what this book was trying to do and there is undoubtedly thematic logic to its conclusion, but for me it didn’t land in a satisfying way. I prefer not to delve into spoilers here; suffice to say that there is a certain amount of sympathy at the end that in my opinion feels unearned. Again, I get it, I think it does make logical sense, but there are some other tweaks I’d have liked to see to really make the ending land. As it is, it hampered my enjoyment of it.

Overall, if you’re looking for something dark and gritty that doesn’t dive into disgusting, The Butcher of the Forest is well worth your time. It’s really excellent across the board and just stumbled a bit at the finish line for me.

Final Grade (all out of ten):

Plot: 6

Characters: 7

Conflict: 8

Theme: 8

Setting: 8

Prose: 10

Tone: 8

Quality: 9

Impact: 8

Enjoyment: 6

Overall: 78/100

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A/N:

Over the next ten days I’ll be releasing full reviews of my top ten books of 2025. From there, I plan on publishing a weekly book review. I’m hoping this is a way to keep me reading regularly and academically.

A quick note on my grading philosophy which I formed listening to a few movie critics. I believe that a 7 in any of the categories above constitutes “Good”. Anything above that is something that is above and beyond in any one particular category. I believe this creates a more nuanced evaluation of any Story. Very, very rarely do I give scores above 90 (8 since I started grading books back in 2022). Consider anything a 70 or above the equivalent of 5 stars.

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