Review: Thornhedge

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a novella, which often means "underdeveloped novel" or "stretched-out short story," but in this case does not; the novella length is the right length for the story it tells.

It's a flip of the Sleeping Beauty story, but (view spoiler)[Sleeping Beauty (here named Fayette) is a changeling, a faerie who is, in human terms, a psychopath, and the main character, Toadling, is the formerly-human fae who was the child Fayette was swapped for. Toadling was raised by Greenteeth in a place where time ran faster, and sent back to Fayette's christening to release a spell which would prevent her doing harm (it's an inter-Fae struggle, partly), but gets it slightly wrong and has to cast Fayette into enchanted sleep and build the thorn hedge around the castle after all the inhabitants have gone, to protect the world from Fayette. (hide spoiler)]

I've spoiler-tagged all of that because we get it as a gradual revelation, through flashbacks and reflection and main character Toadling explaining things to the Muslim knight Hakim (not a prince) who shows up and, for reasons I never quite grasped, feels he has to make his way into the castle and deal with what he finds there. That was the weakest part of the story for me; it wasn't clear to me why he did that, why Toadling didn't try to stop him, or what either of them thought would be the outcome. (view spoiler)[The outcome is something rather close to a Disney Villain Fall, so neither of them bear moral culpability for killing Fayette, who obviously has to die because she just isn't someone who can safely exist in the world. (hide spoiler)]

The story is strongest when it's developing the character and background of Toadling (Hakim gets a lot less development, which is not to say that we don't learn things about how he isn't just what you'd expect from his background and his role in the story). It's weakest when it's addressing what to do with Fayette/Sleeping Beauty. (view spoiler)[I assume this is because the author believes in psychopathy and its incurability, but doesn't believe in putting people to death; I could be wrong. (hide spoiler)] It sets out, in part, to break the traditional equivalences of beauty = goodness and ugliness = evil, which of course the original Sleeping Beauty story (like princess stories in general) is all about, and to my mind succeeds. Toadling is ugly, and she isn't going to become beautiful when some curse is lifted; that's just what she looks like. But she is a good person, if ineffectual and indecisive; hence the strength and weakness I've described above.

Far from a perfect story, and dark in places, though also often funny. Not the best T. Kingfisher, but it was an early one (published after several that were written later), and I can see the strengths of later works in this one. Her later protagonists, happily, were more proactive and decisive, on the whole.

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