★★★★☆ A good and intelligent goose girl

Thorn

Intisar Khanani

The Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd in the Grimm brothers' original German) is one of the more obscure Grimm's Fairy Tales, by which I mean that it has never, to my knowledge, been made into a Disney Feature Film. This obscurity, I suspect, is because it is a disturbingly modern story, in the sense of not having clear heroes and villains. (The Grimm brothers, however, perceived no such ambiguity. For them the princess is unequivocally good and the maid bad, in part because the princess has noble blood and the maid is common. Values have changed since those days.)

The central story is that a princess takes off to marry the prince of a nearby kingdom, to whom she has long been engaged. She is accompanied by a maid. On the trip the maid forcibly swaps places with the princess and makes the princess, on pain of death, swear not to expose her. The princess takes this compelled oath much more seriously than any legal expert would advise. Arrived at the destination, the princess is banished from the castle and given the job of goose girl.

You can always recognize a retelling of The Goose Girl by the presence of a magnificent but creepy white horse named Falada. Falada can speak. This is remarkable only because the Grimm brothers remark on it. In your typical Grimm's fairy tale animals carry on conversations with humans and each other without anyone appearing to think this might be odd. But in the first paragraph of Die Gänsemagd Falada is introduced with these words, "das Pferd der Königstochter hieß Falada und konnte sprechen" -- "the Princess's horse was named Falada, and he could speak."

Intisar Khanani's Thorn has been on my to-read list for well over a year. Last week, however, I read an article in Tor.com's Reactor Magazine about retellings of the Goose Girl, and it reminded me that I want to read Thorn. So I did.

The heroine of Thorn is the princess Alyrra, and she is admirable. As the story begins she is reviled by her mother and brother, for reasons we eventually learn. They call her stupid and see no value in her other than the prospect of marrying her off to secure an alliance. Fortunately, the prince of their powerful neighbor appears to want her, for reasons Mother and Brother cannot work out, but they are certainly not about to reveal their puzzlement. Alyrra is the first-person narrator, and it becomes obvious to the reader that she is in fact much more intelligent than Mother and Brother realize. Also, she is modest and is befriended by servants.

The Goose Girl story happens to this appealing character, and I was cheering her on all the way, even knowing where the story was going.

I have now read three of the Goose Girl retellings listed by Rachel Ayres in her Reactor article: Thorn, Little Thieves, and A Sorceress Comes to Call. These are all very different -- the three authors make different things of the original story. Of the three, Thorn is closest to the original. Margaret Owen's Little Thieves makes a really splendid hero of the evil maid. T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes to Call is the most divergent of the three. The old queen, the princess's mother, is a major character in Kingfisher's version.

Thorn is followed by a short story, The Bone Knife. It is set in the same world and nation as Thorn but is otherwise unrelated. It is more an introduction to the second novel of the Dauntless Path series. I intend to keep reading.

Thorn on Amazon

Goodreads review

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