Thornhedge

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When he had banked the fire and settled down, when his breathing had become slow and even, she slunk into the open. She would have felt safer in toad shape, but elf-knots required fingers.

After a time, there were neither bird-men nor screamers. There was no one at all. The road filled with weeds. Sleeping Beauty wakes up after the kiss of a prince -- Or --Startled by the presence of a strange man, the young lady sat up while sharply wiping her mouth. “And just who the f& But time did pass and perhaps the stories were told less often. Fewer men came to the thorn hedge with axes. The wagtails left, because they preferred open country, and the fairy was sorry to see them go. Jays moved in, flitting through the thorns and blistering the air with their scolds. They were shy and spooked easily, for all their cursing. The fairy recognized kindred spirits, as she still spooked easily herself.Now, my desire for a Thornhedge 2 isn’t so much because Kingfisher leaves us with a major cliffhanger. (She doesn’t; in fact, she wraps the story up nicely.) It just felt like one because I wasn’t ready for Toadling’s story to be over. If you looked in exactly the right place, you might see a few lines a little too straight to be a tree trunk—but you had to know exactly where to look. Haunting and unusual—a unique retelling of a classic tale!" —Tamora Pierce, New York Times bestselling author of the Tortall series Let them not come,” she prayed. She had been told that the Fair Folk were without souls, and probably that applied to her as well, a befuddled creature betwixt and between. Still, just in case, she prayed. “Let them not come here. Let them not clear the thorns. I do not know how many of them I can hold off. Please keep them away. Um. Amen.” Mind you, I am not saying you can't or shouldn't make Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty the villain. You absolutely can. But give reasons. Give a damned reason, don't just make her be. Nobody is born evil, evil is made, evil is nurtured, evil is grown. But Fayette here is evil from the cradle, literally and not figuratively, unless you want to say the botched gift made her be, which isn't what the text implies.

I would recommend it to any Reader who enjoys twists on classic tales, whimsical, cozy fantasies, or Kingfisher's work in general. There is no way this story isn't going to bring a smile to your face. I enjoyed how Kingfisher gave us enough of the original tale that you could figure out what she was alluding to, yet she brought her own original twist that caused me to view the fairy tale in a while new light. The weeds were trampled down again, in time, and the traffic became more normal. The style of clothing changed and changed again, and the Traveling Folk came again in their wagons, and still no one ventured into the brambles for a long, long time.Thornhedge is full of the delightful fairytale imagery of fairies, a king and his queen, a princess, a kind knight, and all the wonderful elements one would expect to find in a make-believe kingdom.

Toadling tells Halim her (and thus the sleeper’s) story in bits, so that by the time we are nearing the end, we know all there is to know about how the whole princess-in-a-tower situation came to be, the decisions that were made, the actions that followed and the active perils. The sleeping Beauty by Viktor Vasnetsov - image from Wiki - Showing the somnolence of the entire household - not so much in this telling

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Thank you to Tor Publishing Group, Tor Books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own. Her first instinct was to go to toad shape, but that would have meant another motion, even a small one, as she dropped to the earth. Instead, she stayed absolutely still, unmoving, not even drawing breath. 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. The seasons chased one another, and a day came when she heard hoofbeats. Men coming from the east, on their fine-boned horses, riding down the ruined road. They wore no armor. There were two bird-men in their midst, also on horses, and they were riding hard as if afraid.