NetGalley Review: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Hey all, Sam here.
Getting back into a normal work/life balance and rhythm after attending a great convention is not easy. I find that I’m just feeling tired and my typical day-to-day just seems dull in comparison.
Then again, I have lived on the road, working convention after convention pretty much every weekend, and I honestly would not want to live that life again.
So, it has been nice to get back to reading (and the con did get me back into writing again). Those few days at Gen Con I did basically no reading and that didn’t work for me. I like getting to read every day.
It makes me very glad that a couple of my reads this week have been shorter, because I’ve been able to read them very quickly and get the reviews written up for the planned review schedule…which is what we’re doing today. This is one of my NetGalley reads, and this book will be out in the US on Aug 15th, so there’s not much longer to wait.
Let’s get started…
My Thoughts
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.
*A very special hardcover edition, featuring foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.*
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 her: 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…
“The way Thornhedge turns all the fairy tales inside out is a sharp-edged delight.”
―Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor
Rating: 4.5 stars
I’m a newer T. Kingfisher fan, only starting to read her books in the last couple of years, and not reading them too frequently…which is stupid, because I have enjoyed every one of them.
Seriously my main complaint with this one is that I wanted it to be longer. I wanted to spend more time with Toadling and Halim. I wanted more time for the story to breathe and expand. This was a novella, and it felt like a shorter novella, so probably around 120 pages. I read it very quickly. I think it only took me like an hour to complete.
I enjoyed the concept and the setup. But I feel like many things were basically glossed over. And perhaps that’s because our protagonist narrator Toadling doesn’t pay much attention to these things, but still.
Toadling was so sweet and loving, and I’m glad she found a loving family…even if they were a bunch of swamp-dwelling faerie monsters. And Halim seemed gentle and sweet and good too. He mentioned how great his mother was several times, and I found myself wanting to see Halim take Toadling to meet her, but that didn’t happen.
Thornhedge is a Sleeping Beauty retelling, with the interesting twist that the princess is the antagonist, and so there is a different reason for the enchanted slumber and the hedge of thorns around the keep. It was also interesting in that Toadling was a human who was taken by the faeries minutes after her birth and raised in the faerie realm, which basically gave her some faerie abilities and such. Our princess is the changeling left in her place. And all of this is made possible by the difference in the passing of time of the human world and faerieland, because years pass in the faerieland in just hours of the human world.
The story wrapped up nicely, and so it doesn’t necessarily NEED a follow-up, but I admit that I’d love to have another story where we could follow Toadling as she explores more of the world, because there’s so much out there she doesn’t know, and her family will be there to welcome her back when she’s ready to return, even if that is years and years later. There was something cute and warm and cozy about that fact.
All right, well that is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
