★★★★☆ Such a sweet little monster...

Thornhedge

T Kingfisher

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon) is an inside-out Sleeping Beauty retelling. The hero of the story is a little fairy called Toadling, so called because she can turn into a toad at will. As the book begins, she is guarding a sleeper in a tower hidden in a forest of thorns. She has been doing this for over two hundred years, and she has deterred many people from the tower. As this statement should make clear, the beginning of the book is not the beginning of Toadling's story. The book begins with the arrival of a sympathetic and friendly knight at the thorn forest. We do eventually learn the whole of Toadling's story.

I loved this little story. Kingfisher has this to say about how she wrote it

Once I had Toadling, the whole thing just flowed...
It was really very sweet, and so if someone asked me about Thornhedge, 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.

It IS! A sweet little book that you can read in less than two hours. I loved it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor for an advance reader copy of Thornhedge. This review expresses my honest opinion.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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