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Thornhedge

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A very special hardcover edition, featuring foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.* He did not go away. He led his horse onward, making a slow circuit of the thorn hedge. The fairy followed.

The twist itself was fascinating to me. Darker than I expected, but whimsical at the same time. I was really impressed with it. I've often hated her snarky commentary on fairy tales (see her inserts for the Halcyon anthology) because that's shown her as one of those who take tales literally and miss the metaphor and symbolism alongside the point of the story. But this is frankly too much. Because redeeming the evil fairy doesn't have to mean villainising the sleeping maiden, which is exactly what is done here. The fairy is made into a good-hearted if clumsy character and the sleeping maiden is a psychopathic child who is evil from birth for no reason at all besides her origins. She is evil and murderous and cruel merely because she has to be like that, that's her nature, and the poor clumsy fairy has to stop her from doing harm. Everything the fairy Toadling does is good and justified, everything Princess Fayette does is evil and unexplainably unjustified. No in-between, no nuance, no nothing. This time, what if it was not a dark force, but a kind one that had caused all those zzzzzzzzzs? What if there was a good reason for doing so? What is someone was charged with making sure that no one disturbed the sleeper, however many years, decades, centuries might pass? One thing I like to do with fairy tales is to look at them and go “How can I make this even worse?” - from the Grim Dark interviewI am not so sure that Kingfisher’s tale really is a worse version. Well, maybe worse that the Disney version. But far from the worst. There is one (and there are others as bad) in which a wandering king happens by the castle where a sleeper named Talia is housed. He decides this is a great opportunity for him, absconds with her virginity, and leaves the unconscious Talia pregnant with twins. What a guy!

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And what time period is this even? We are told Justinian's third plague came and went, which would make it the 1800s (or the early 2000s if we take into account that Halim tells Toadling it's been two centuries since; see? No sense of period), but . . . there are still questing knights and the overall setting is like the 1400s, the time of the second Justinian plague, but . . . we are told calling Muslims "Saracens" is politically incorrect now and there's an anachronistic merry and amiable interaction between Halim, the Muslim knight, and a Christian monk at a monastery that apparently lets a foreign knight with no letters of introduction (and a Muslim at that) into the monastery to read old manuscripts that would be in Latin, a language our so very Muslim Halim doesn't speak. At this point, what's missing is a rabbi to complete this idyllic religious tolerance at a time when the Crusades were yet to go out with a last hurrah. Oh, and did I mention that priests and nuns have no issue with the pagan creatures that are fairies and folk from Faerie, and teach them the Lord's Prayer whilst being tolerant of their magic? Goodness, I could go on and on and on with the extremely implausible historical setting of this retelling!

A century later, a knight approaches a wall of brambles, an impenetrable fortress of thorns. He's heard legends of a cursed Princess high in a tower. He's here to save her, as knights do. toading, the main character, is truly wonderful. and I loved seeing her watch generation after generation pass while protecting this tower, until one day a prince comes that makes her want to do things a little differently. i loved seeing her growing up among the fae, with a family and community who loved her unapologetically with everything they had. and i loved the writing of this and how beautifully kingfisher was able to blend past and present narratives together. i know this review is a little all over the place, but i still recommend this one and i can’t wait to continue reading everything from this author. But sometimes it’s just not enough. “It should have mattered. All that love and all that trying should have changed … something…” * I enjoyed it way more than I expected to. I’m usually not too keen on retellings (even from Kingfisher herself), but this one is very much it’s own story of guilt and regret just leaning on the framework of a fairytale, and that’s alright with me. Once she came into adulthood though, the faeries asked a favor of her that ended up changing everything.

And that's what nukes a retelling out of orbit for me. There's nothing I loathe as much as villainising the hero to redeem the villain from the original tale. It's nothing but a lazy exchange of places. It's what lazy authors do when they want to redeem the Evil Queen by making Snow White the monster instead of, you know, giving the Evil Queen a reason to be like this that is plausible. And in the case of Sleeping Beauty, to villainise her is even worse because it's one of those tales in which she's done absolutely nothing to deserve her tragic fate (because it IS tragic from any angle you look at it, she's basically comatose and at the mercy of everything and everyone) and, in the darker and older version, she's even raped in her sleep and gives birth to rape babies. So how can you make the victim the evildoer with no reason ever given? T. Kingfisher even argues in her notes that "After all, why would you trap someone inside a hedge of thorns, anyway? Because you wanted to contain her. Because there was some reason you didn’t want her to get out. Because she was dangerous," thus essentially deciding to blame the victim. I did, however, really enjoy the way the magic mixes with the world and the kingdom falling into a state of disrepair as ‘ the people bled away drop by drop and nobody tried to staunch the flow.’ You do feel Toadling’s sadness and longing quite strongly, and I found her to be such a well constructed and lovable character you really do root for. That is the kind of fairytale at the center of T. Kingfisher’s latest novella, Thornhedge , a delicate, sharp-edged story of a princess in a tower that’s actually a meditation on duty, loss, and grief. A bittersweet exploration of the power of language, the way stories shift and change over time, and the weight of the promises we make to others, it’s bleak and challenging and beautiful in all the best possible ways. If only because, at its heart, this is a story that reminds us, as Peter Beagle once said, there are no happy endings, not really—because nothing ever truly ends.

Toadling stole my heart with her unselfishness and kind demeanor. She wants so badly to do the right thing and I admired her dedication. She has been alone for a long time and when a knight appears, everything changes. He can’t see that. I can barely see it, and I remember when the tower was new. Oh, why won’t he go away? She is asked to return to the world of humans to bless a newborn child. A little girl. A bumbling, beautiful baby girl... The way Thornhedge turns all the fairy tales inside out is a sharp-edged delight." —Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor For Thornhedge, I was fortunate to have both a physical ARC, which I read first, and an ALC, which I listened to second. The narrator, Jennifer Blom, offers excellent voicing skills. Although, audiobooks are my preference, any format you choose for this story will be a delight.The sleeping Beauty by Viktor Vasnetsov - image from Wiki - Showing the somnolence of the entire household - not so much in this telling I mostly came for answers,’ our knight tells Toadling, ‘ or maybe just the story.’ Unlike most knights, this one is more interested in winning a story and seemingly not a beautiful princess, though I’m sure it has crossed his mind. Kingfisher plays with some expectations here as well, making him a Muslim knight and also describing him as not particularly attractive as well. Though this does touch on how it is sort of unclear when this story is supposed to take place or if it is actually our Earth or a fantasy world with most of the same elements and general vibes. I mean, I do enjoy that we are going for an inclusive story but Toadling was just describing people waving crusades banners and now monks are just hanging with the Muslim knight talking about god like everything is just cool? It seemed a missed opportunity to discuss the religious violence or at least find a way to frame the story in history. Which I guess we are supposed to brush aside for the sake of the story, but at least the world building for the world of fairies is rather lovely and I especially enjoy the way time works in this book with decades passing in the fairy realm being only a few days in the human one. Anyways, an interesting dynamic is that the knight has to confront the version of the story he has heard with the existence and warnings of Toadling, who is pretty charming in her quirky shyness (poor fairy girl has been in solitude for centuries, so you’ll forgive her awkwardness) but doesn’t really fit the bill for a heroic knights quest. His stubbornness in thinking he can lift a non-existent curse on her (does he think she’ll turn beautiful?) makes for some rather cute and charming scenes.

I will start with elf-knots, she told herself firmly. Lots and lots of them. It will take him a week to comb his hair. He’ll leave tomorrow morning, she told herself. He’s searching for a place to camp that won’t cost any money—that’s all. Go away, she thought. Go away. Quit looking. They can’t be telling stories, not now. It’s been so long …The fairy was filled with dread when she heard the ringing of nearby axes. She crouched in the brambles, toad-shaped, motionless, thinking, What will I do if they come nearer? For her part, Toadling is riven with guilt for having messed up a magical task she had been assigned, thus her lengthy tenure at this post. She is dutiful, and honor-bound. trigger + content warnings: blood, plague, death, kidnapping, captivity, brief mention of child birth, death of a child, self harm for magic / testing magic, mention of animal cruelty, physical abuse (slap), suicide mention, violence, extreme isolation When Toadling reaches adulthood she's asked to return to the human world to bless a newborn child. Trouble is, she garbles the words and the blessing turns into a curse. Minds are easily enchanted by tales of heroic journeys with the promise of a beautiful maiden in need of rescuing. It’s a staple of fairy tales and also a point that has inspired many retellings with gender-bent twists or heroic heroines who don’t need saving. All of which might have us considering what the romanticization of tales like this suggest are social values and what constitutes as heroic. Thornhedge, the latest novella from T. Kingfisher in Tor’s recent line-up of her works (though, according to the author’s note, the first manuscript she submitted), probes such questions through her loose retelling of the Sleeping Beauty tale. It is a quiet, sweet story, if a little sauceless at times, where we find the fairy who has cursed a young maiden to a lengthy sleep is not evil at all. Toadling ‘ had lived with dread for 200 years’ standing sentry outside the tower where the young princess rests, though when a knight comes ‘ because of a story’ seeking some sort of adventure or at least to know if it is true, the truth behind the myth comes out for why she would prefer he did not continue his quest. While this is admittedly fun with a lot going for it—especially Toadling who is so endearing—it simultaneously feels like it doesn’t lean into it’s own retelling enough while also relying to much on it as the bones to hold the whole structure up. Sweet and imaginative, though perhaps needing more nuance and room to breathe to allow the long history of events stretch their narrative legs a bit, Thornhedge is still an interesting look at how stories can twist to romanticize a tale at the expense of the truth.

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