The Seven Plaits of Nettles, and other stories

These are old fairy tales, the kind that don't ask permission before they hook you. The title story sends a girl into the forest to gather nettles and plait them seven times, and what happens next has the strange, inevitable logic of all the best folklore - not quite a nightmare, not quite a dream, but something that sits in the chest and stays. Other tales follow: children who wander into other worlds, kindness that costs something, cruelties that unfurl like vines. Vredenburg writes with the confidence of someone who knows that children can handle stories with real teeth, that magic works best when it isn't explained. There's no hand-wringing here, no moral megaphone. The lessons emerge the way they always have in oral tradition - through image, through consequence, through the particular weight of what happens next. This is the book you want to leave on a bedside table for a child who's ready to be transported somewhere they can't quite name.