In my post-Paladin’s Faith hangover, I naturally turned to the only other T. Kingfisher book I had yet to read, Thornhedge, a novella-length Sleeping Beauty retelling.
The author’s note at the end says that this is the first thing she sold to Tor, though for publishing reasons other things have come out first. And having read it, I can see why. As Kingfisher says,
[…] I would probably say that it is a sweet book, and then presumably someone would point out that the heroine is raised by child-eating fish monsters and the villain is torturing people and animating the dead, and I would be left flailing my hands around and saying, “But it’s sweet! Really!” because I am not always the best at judging the tone of my own work.
… I still think it’s sweet, dammit.
I agree with her: it is sweet. In contrast, her two books from Saga Press are contemporary supernatural horror, and then the books Tor published subsequently are secondary-world fairy-tale-quest-horror, 19th century horror pastiche, and contemporary supernatural horror again. [*] Following up the Saga-published books with a sweet short fairy-tale retelling could easily give the wrong idea about where her oeuvre was headed.
Anyway. This is Sleeping Beauty in which the imprisoning fairy shapeshifts between girl and toad, and a kind and thoughtful Muslim knight shows up having read about a cursed keep in some old books. (This is also an alternate history in which a cure for plague was found "in the Holy Land" before the Crusades happened, and Muslim refugees peacefully settled a depopulated Europe. I think it’s roughly 1100 C.E., though there’s a reference to it being more than 200 years since "Justinian’s third plague" that I was confused by for a while, as I could find the Plague of Justinian or the third plague pandemic but not both, as it were.)
There’s not a lot of surprises here, but there is a lot of decency and people doing their best, which makes this far from the worst way to spend a bit of time.
[*] Since this is the night where I recap lots of T. Kingfisher books I haven’t booklogged, those books, in the order mentioned, and what I thought of them:
- The Twisted Ones: incredibly scary;
- The Hollow Places: less to my taste;
- Nettle and Bone: fucking great;
- What Moves the Dead: I wanted it to be science fiction instead;
- A House with Good Bones: I’ve run out of patience for the protagonist of a contemporary supernatural horror novel taking time to accept what genre she is in, which is completely unfair of me but there you go.