9/365: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher Rating: ★★★★ Publication Date: August 15, 2023 Genre: fantasy Pages: 115 ReRead?: No 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 Toadling: 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…

This is the 10th day in a row that I’ve posted here. You may recall that on August 31, I mentioned that I was dialing back my ongoing projects and that I was going to read by whim for a while. There’s a bit more to it than that, but I wanted to wait until I had gotten into a groove before posting on it further. I’m going to start by talking a book that is not Thornhedge.

A few years ago, I read this book – Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovich. I read a lot of books in this small sub-genre that I generally refer to as “books about books.” They usually rely upon some conceit or another, and often that conceit is related to a yearly project.

In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovich reads a book a day for a year. All different genres of books, without really anything to tie them together beyond the fact that she was able to read them in a single day. So, obviously, no War and Peace, no doorstoppers, nothing that exceeds around 250 pages.

I am retired and I read at a pretty good clip – about 100 pages an hour. This, I thought to myself, was something that I could do. Maybe. But did I want to? I considered it for several days and finally concluded that yeah, I think that this could be fun. So, as of September 1, I started.

The parameters are minimal: pick a book, read it, and write a post. I put out a call to a bunch of my book friends for novellas and other books that are under 300 pages and started requesting library books. I pulled a bunch of unread, shorter, books off my library shelves and put them on my book cart. I reshelved the long classics that I had been planning on reading. For the last 10 days, my morning has involved choosing a book off the book cart based on whatever it is that I feel like reading.

I bought myself a new calendar, so I have a place to track the titles.

The only other element of this is that I am trying to read mostly print books, and weaning myself off of the dreaded doomscroll. I’ve also granted that, from time to time, my life will not have time for 200 or so pages, and, on those days, a short story will suffice. I’m going to try not to repeat authors and series, but that’s not a hard and fast rule.

So far, I am enjoying myself. If it starts becoming overly burdensome – more of an albatross than a challenge – well, I reserve the right to rethink. But reading something from start to finish in what is often a single sitting has really been satisfying so far. It’s easy to get immersed in a book for an hour or two. So far, it’s been fun to sit down at the computer and bang out a post each evening.

Also, as it turns out, I can continue to read other, longer books, because as I said, I am retired and I read at a pretty good clip.

So, now to Thornhedge. This is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, with the roles of villain and victim reversed. I’ve checked out books by T. Kingfisher before (Nettle & Bone, in particular) but I’ve never actually gotten to them. I really liked this novella. It’s sweet, but with an edge. Disney is unlikely to option it for the full Disney treatment, although I think Toadling would actually be sort of great as a Disney princess.

Fall, to me, feels like the time to read fairy tales. And from that perspective, this is a perfect way to spend an hour.