Book Review: "Thornhedge"
T. Kingfisher enchants again in this very unusual yet utterly compelling reimagining of "Sleeping Beauty."
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.
I’ve recently fallen in love with the works of T. Kingfisher, and I’ve yet to read anything by her that is anything less than amazing. Even by that standard, though, Thornhedge is a remarkable piece of fantasy storytelling. On the surface it appears to be just another retelling of a fairy tale–this time of Sleeping Beauty–but, on closer inspection, it reveals itself to be a rumination on a whole host of weighty issues, including found family, grief, and regret.
When the story begins, we’re introduced to Toadling, who spends two centuries guarding a tower and making sure that it isn’t broken into by various traveling knights. As it turns out, Toadling was born human but, thanks to the fairies, taken away from her parents, raised in the world of Faerie, with a sinister changeling left in her place. The novel alternates between two time periods, with the present focusing on Toadling’s growing bond with the knight Halim and the past showing how it came to pass that this little fairy managed to imprison her counterpart with a sleep spell in order to keep her from wreaking any further havoc on the human world.
In other words, Thornhedge is Sleeping Beauty from the point of view of the supposedly evil fairy. As the book demonstrates, however, there are always two sides to every story, and Toadling is essentially meant to protect humans from the dangerous and callously malicious being that’s in their midst. Her tragedy stems from the fact that, for all that she might have been trained by her fellow fairies in magic, her essentially decent nature leads her to try to help her mother–who believes the changeling is her own child–which, in turn, means that she bungles the spell meant to contain her replacement. Fayette, the fairy who has taken her place, thus begins to grow up into a truly horrible creature, capable of acts of great cruelty toward animals and humans alike.
Kingfisher is one of those writers who has a prose style that is somehow beautiful, detailed, and yet elegantly simple. She doesn’t drown the reader with flowery or overwrought metaphors, but such is her skill with description that you really do feel as if you are right there with her characters as they move through strange, fantastical, and often quite dangerous worlds. At the same time, she also gives us a number of characters who are richly and deftly textured, who seem to fairly leap off of the page and into our imaginations.
Take, for example, our main character, Toadling. Thanks to the flashbacks we get a sense of what her childhood and youth was like in the world of the fairies. It’s a world that has its own strange sort of beauty, even among the lesser fairies who take her in as one of their own and teach her their ways, including the ability to turn into a toad at will. To human eyes the varoius creatures that nurture Toadling would no doubt look like monsters–and Kingfisher herself refers to them as such in her acknowledgments–but they are also much kinder to the little human in their midst than are most of Toadling’s own kind. It’s thus no wonder that she feels herself yearning to return to them after so many centuries spent among humans. She might have been born a mortal, but her time spent among the people of Faerie has changed her irrevocably, mostly for the better.
Toadling might be a strange little creature, but it’s impossible not to love her, particularly since she gives so much of her life to attempting to protect others–both human and animal alike–from the tyranny of Fayette. This is particularly true when it comes to Halim, who also falls afoul of the changeling after she has been woken up from her enchanted slumber. Even though her own life is in danger–she is the one responsible for keeping Fayette in an enchanted sleep for two centuries–it’s still Halim’s welfare that she cares the most about and for which she almost loses her life.
As for Fayette…I have seldom read of a more terrifying fairy creature. It’s not that she’s malevolent, or at least not as we would define that term. Instead, what makes her so unsettling is the fact that she is so utterly alien, so far beyond the scope of the human that she might as well be from another planet. Toadling mentions several times that this is precisely what makes the fairies so terrifying and so dangerous to humans. They are not only very powerful, but they are also very capricious and prone to having short attention spans, which is perhaps for the best, at least as far as human welfare is concerned.
The brilliance of Kingfisher’s novella is that it manages to be a satisfying story in and of itself while also gesturing to a broader world that is left in the background. I know that I, for one, wouldn’t say no to hearing more about the fairies and their various practices and feuds, particularly since it’s clear that they kidnap one another’s babies and send them into the human world in order to cause chaos and strife and misery. Perhaps we’ll get lucky, and she’ll give us more stories set in this magical yet ever-so-slightly-terrifying world.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Halim. From the moment we meet him it’s clear that, like Toadling, he’s just a good soul. He genuinely cares about her, despite the fact that she is, by her own admission, rather plain and hasn’t really succeeded in her mission as a fairy. As so often in Kingfisher’s work, the strongest bonds are those that emerge between found family, and I am very much here for it.
Suffice it to say, then, that I quite enjoyed Thornhedge. Kingfisher has breathed more than a little fresh life and air into one of the most well-known and beloved fairy tales, and she remains the undisputed champion of the fantasy novella.