Review: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
From the Publisher:
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 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…
Review:
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but I’m a huge T. Kingfisher fan. She is an automatic order author for me, so I had been anxiously awaiting this book. I also went into this knowing only that they had a new book out and I was going to read it, because automatic order author. The book was… aggressively ok?
Toadling is a fairy tasked with guarding the tower that holds a beautiful but evil sleeping girl. She has lived through many centuries driving off any who try to enter the thorn hedge to try to get to the keep. Eventually, humans forget and Toadling starts to relax, until Halim, a minor noble and knight, comes to see if the legend of the tower is true. He's not so easily dissuaded by Toadling and now she has to decide if she should let him in to see the tower and its occupant or if she should risk their friendship in sending him away.
The book is short. It's 111 pages and when I pulled it out of the box, the cover was thicker than the pages inside. It was almost comical. The story itself had a lot of promise and potential and was intriguing but it was definitely missing both the banter and the subtle creepiness that are the heart of all T. Kingfisher stories. The premise of what if Sleeping Beauty was an evil fae changeling is amazing, but this just kind of fell flat for me. I am giving it four stars because T. Kingfisher created the endpaper art and that in itself is worthy of a star.
4/5 stars (3 out of 5 if we’re not counting the endpaper artwork)
Definitely kid friendly. My terrified of all things creepy child wouldn’t even bat an eye at this.