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Book Reviewed by:From USA Today bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is the tale of a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.
There's a princess trapped in a tower. This isn't her story.
Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?
But nothing with fairies is ever simple.
Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He's heard there's a curse here that needs breaking, but it's a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…
CHAPTER 1
In the early days, the wall of thorns had been distressingly obvious. There was simply no way to hide a hedge with thorns like sword blades and stems as thick as a man's thigh. A wall like that invited curiosity and with curiosity came axes, and it was all the fairy could do to keep some of those curious folk from gaining entrance to the tower.
Eventually, though, the brambles had grown up around the edges—blackberry and briar and dog rose, all the weedy opportunists—and that softened the edge of the thorn wall and gave the fairy some breathing room. Roving princes and penniless younger sons had been fascinated by the thorns, which were so obviously there to keep people out. Hardly anybody was interested in a bramble thicket.
It helped, too, that the land around the thorns became inhospitable. It was nothing so obvious as a desert, but wells ran dry practically as soon as they had been dug, and rain passed through the soil as if it were sand instead of loam. ...
Hugo Awards
2024
Kingfisher, who also writes children's books under the name Ursula Vernon, knows how to spin a compelling tale. Toadling's story—and the castle's lurking secrets—unfold gradually, interspersed with scenes depicting her growing friendship with Halim. As the narrative progresses, so does readers' sense of mounting horror and dread, as they realize just how high the stakes are, even as they, like the curious Halim, might want to see the truth for themselves. Kingfisher consistently upends expectations, whether by having her aspiring Prince Charming be a Muslim refugee from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), or by making her heroine not the sleeping princess but the ugly creature who cursed her...continued
Full Review
(529 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Juliet Marillier, author of the Blackthorn & Grim and Warrior Bards series
Kingfisher weaves elements of fairy tale, folklore, and history in this beautifully crafted story of loss, endurance, terror, and kindness. Thornhedge is sheer magic from beginning to end! Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor
The way Thornhedge turns all the fairy tales inside out is a sharp-edged delight. Katherine Arden, bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale
Immensely charming, unexpected, full of heart, I was utterly delighted by this incredibly original retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Naomi Novik, New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education
I opened, I devoured. Absolutely delightful and full of charm and truth. Peter S. Beagle, Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus-Award winning author of The Last Unicorn
Kingfisher never fails to dazzle. Sunyi Dean, author of The Book Eaters
At every turn, Kingfisher subverts familiar fairytale tropes into a fresh, complex, and extremely human story about loneliness, and the protective barriers we put around ourselves. Tamora Pierce, New York Times bestselling author of the Tortall series
Haunting and unusual—a unique retelling of a classic tale! Travis Baldree, New York Times bestselling author of Legends & Lattes
Toadling will break your heart and mend it at the same time, and that is how you know that Thornhedge is a story by T. Kingfisher. I loved this book so much.
In addition to being a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, T. Kingfisher's novella Thornhedge is inspired in part by the tradition of stories about changelings. In European folklore, changelings represented an intersection between the fairy world and the human world; a fairy would steal a baby—usually one who had not yet been baptized—from its cradle and leave a non-human replacement.
The human child could then serve as a servant or a source of amusement to the fairies, or, according to some stories, could fulfill old deals with the devil. Meanwhile, the changeling, who was often believed to not be a child at all, but rather an old, worn out, or particularly nasty fairy, or even an enchanted object like a block...
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