Rating:

“The love of monsters was uncomplicated.”

Author: T. Kingfisher

What if Sleeping Beauty was the villain? What if the fairy who arrived at her christening was trying to save both her and the kingdom from despair?

Only T. Kingfisher can take a well-known fairy tale and flip it around, making the princess into the monster and bringing the magical world of the Green Teeth and fairy courts alive. And we’re here for every bit of it.

The story opens with a lone fairy, Toadling, who mostly takes the form of a toad and watches a dense tangle of brambles that hide an abandoned court and a tower with a slumbering evil. It has been centuries since Toadling has taken her station. The world outside has come and gone. A plague has killed half the planet. And yet for Toadling the everyday monotony and the creeping terror that someday the spell will lift, or someday a knight will come along that she cannot stop, remains fresh as the world recedes.

And then a knight does arrive, and he talks to her. And she talks back.

This then, is her story.

Thornhedge is a delight from start to finish, catapulting us into a world of weak kings, strong towers, and wicked fairies. In this world, poor Toadling is just as alien as we are. Indeed, she is stuck between the human world and the world of the fey, and she belongs in neither. She is only tolerated in both, and her call to this, her father’s castle, takes her from the only true affection she has ever known: the love of monsters.

Toadling is at once empathetic and mysterious as she slowly unweaves her tale. We know from the beginning, even as she tries to convince the brave night, Halim, that there is more to her story. She admits to the enchantment, to her self-enforced exile to keep it alive, and even without the details, we see her gentleness, her meekness, her beleaguered nature. And we know. This is a complicated story, and the real villain hasn’t entered the picture yet.

As Thornhedge progresses, we go back and forth between past and present. Toadling relates her story, reflecting over the battles of the past. Meanwhile, we watch Halim in real time, hacking through the brambles and developing a bond with the unassuming Toadling. The bond brings us into Toadling’s world too, into her story, and long before the reveal of just who sleeps in the tower and why, we believe that Toadling is good.

But the danger hasn’t passed. Does Halim believe, and will he now do what must be done to save Toadling and end the curse?

The story is breathless and intensive. It’s a fast book and reads quickly, the kind of story that could ensorcell a child, making them stare-wide eyed into the candlelit face of an adult painting a picture of a land far away and long ago that still slumbers just outside of our line of site.

The ending gives us everything we wanted and more. It keeps true to the subject, the nature of the fey, and yet gives us a conclusion with some goodness. It goes so fast, this story, but yet it lingers: the sights and emotions it paints in our minds such as the twitching body on the tower stairs, the unassuming toad in the mud, the not-so-good knight who swears and apologizes and talks of his mother, and finally the luminosity and heft of water, never contained, always powerful. It’s a story that tugs at both the heart and the imagination, one that recasts villains and heroes, found family and love, belonging and longing against the shadowy realms of the terrifying kingdoms of fairies and the exoticness of ancient castles and cursed lands. Highly recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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