Thornhedge is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. In it, a young fairy named Toadling is tasked to protect the sleeping place of a princess. After two centuries of no one finding the castle or investigating the hedge and the brambles around it, a knight arrives, sending Toadling into a panic. (She had mostly been hoping that the story about the cursed castle had been forgotten. No such luck! Our Girl is not the bookish sort, having been raised by greenteeth, a type of predatory water fairy–who somehow raised Toadling to be an absolute cinnamon roll of a Protagonist. It does not occur to her that the story might have been written down. The knight–who is the bookish sort–found out about the mysterious cursed castle from a book.)
Being T. Kingfisher, this is not a straightforward retelling of the fairytale. The sleeping princess really has more in common with the child character in the movie The Bad Seed than with Aurora, for starters. The story of how Toadling was given the task of being the princess’ fairy godmother and how everything goes swiftly downhill from there is interspersed with Toadling’s interactions with the knight, a very nice young man named Halim. (Some fun worldbuilding–I’m pretty sure this is an alternate history as there are multiple knightly orders for various religions, including pagan apparently. Halim is a Muslim which causes some awkward exchanges because Toadling’s information about Muslims is kind of out of date or just plain wrong. Halim is a Good Kid and seems to regard it as a “one in ten thousand” moment.)
Thornhedge manages to be charming and strangely sweet, even when the Protagonist was raised by child-eating fairies and the Antagonist is actually kind of scary for an eight year old sleeping princess. (How, how did the Protagonist get raised by scary water fairies and turn out to be a complete cinnamon roll? Specifically, how do scary water fairies with only a very vague-according-to-narrative maternal instincts be such good parents in comparison to the king and queen, who love their daughter but are not able help her any more than Toadling was able to–and Toadling definitely wanted to despite everything, which makes the story kind of sad in a way.) This book was a fast and entertaining read with lots of heart and engaging characters. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and highly recommend it.
This review was based off of a galley copy received from NetGalley.
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