Hello everyone! Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Redwood Bargain by Markelle Grabo
Genre: YA Fantasy
Publishing date: April 28, 2026
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Rep: Sapphic, LGBT+
SYNOPSIS
To free her cousin from an indentured contract, Katrien agrees to fulfill their lord’s bargain with the fabled “Redwood Man.” Three maids before her have posed as his stepdaughter, Lady Zaviera, and met this lord of the forest as promised. But Katrien means to be the first to fool him—and live.
Impersonating a Lady is no easy feat, especially one as beautiful and aloof as Zaviera. With one month before she’s sent off, Katrien is put through endless lessons, even as the Redwood Man’s suffocating vines overtake the manor and threaten its staff.
Zaviera takes a special interest in her training, and their shared interests grow into shared affections. But the Redwood Man awaits his prize. Caught between duty and desire, her future and her past, Katrien must navigate a tricky bargain—or risk failing those she holds dearest.
REVIEW
This book was received from the Author, and Publisher, in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.
This is a non spoiler review, because you as reader need to read this book. Also, I feel sometimes I have in the past gave away to much of the plot line. This has diminished the pleasure for would be readers.
Thanks to @pagestreetya @markellegrabo and @storygramtours for the #gifted copy! #theredwoodbargain #storygramtours for my early copy of this book
I was not prepared for how deeply this book would sink its roots into me.
The Redwood Bargain is a gothic fairy tale retelling that feels both achingly familiar and completely unlike anything I have read before. Markelle Grabo takes the bones of a Brothers Grimm story and builds something lush, eerie, and emotionally devastating around them. From the very first page, the atmosphere wraps around you like ivy crawling up stone walls and refuses to let go.
Katrien is the kind of protagonist who breaks your heart quietly. She carries guilt the way some people carry heirlooms, heavy and inherited, and her decision to step into the place of the girls before her feels both reckless and completely inevitable. Watching her transform from kitchen maid to noblewoman in a race against time and a forest lord’s growing impatience is tense and compelling. The world Grabo has built feels grounded in something like the late Victorian or Edwardian era, which gives the class dynamics and the weight of servitude a very real, very suffocating texture.
And then there is Zaviera. The sapphic romance at the heart of this story is tender and slow and genuinely moving. These two characters find each other in stolen glances and shared lessons, and the way their feelings grow despite every reason they should not is beautiful. There is something so quietly radical about a love story set in this world that does not burden itself with shame.
The Redwood Man himself is a genuinely unsettling presence. The creeping vines, the bodies of the girls who came before, the ticking clock of his patience all create a dread that permeates every chapter. The pacing is deliberately slow in the best possible way, mirroring the suffocating spread of roots through the manor.
This is a book about guilt and duty and what we owe the people we love, and whether love itself can be a form of redemption. It is atmospheric, queer, heartfelt, and haunting in equal measure. If you love gothic fiction, sapphic romance, and fairy tales that earn their darkness, do not let this one pass you by.
AUTHOR
Markelle Grabo started writing in 5th grade once she realized her squeamish nature wouldn’t lend itself well to a career in Marine Biology. After growing up in Wisconsin, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Loyola University Chicago and her master’s degree in creative writing for children and young adults from Hamline University, where she wrote the first draft of her debut YA novel, Call Forth a Fox.
When not writing, Markelle enjoys hiking, food adventures, and going to the movies. Whatever she’s doing, she’s usually listening to an audiobook or a podcast at the same time. She lives in the Greater Chicago Area with her husband and their two very fluffy cats, Matcha and Kava.
Markelle is the author of Call Forth a Fox and The Redwood Bargain (April 2026). She is represented by Tricia Lawrence of Aevitas Creative Management.
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