Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“The only curse is that she is a changeling. And she will be as cruel as she can, because that is the nature of changelings. Good spirits do not steal away babies to take their place. It is only the wicked that are sent to make mischief. And only the dutiful that are sent to try and stop them.”
To me evil is actually scarier when it’s an evil kid who’s evil just because, and your love and devotion and care is not enough to change a sociopath into something less horrifying. (Some people are just born cruel assholes and you can’t convince me otherwise). (Maybe that stems from reading The Omen at the tender age of eight and getting terrified out of my mind by the idea of an evil toddler who’s pure evil, evilly* ). Human brain wants explanations and reason for evil because it’s more rational then, rather than “just because”, and probably susceptible to fixing it with enough effort and care.
But sometimes it’s just not enough.
“It should have mattered. All that love and all that trying should have changed … something…”
*
But sometimes a good solution to evil may be “stab it with the pointy end”, but to thoughtful, kind and careful people that solution is very hard to arrive at.
And yet despite the inclusion of an evil child torturing living beings “just because”, it’s surprisingly a very sweet book. Playing off the role reversal in Sleeping Beauty tale, it focuses on a kind and quiet “villain” who’s just keeping evil at bay. Toadling is a non-pretty kid traded at birth for a changeling, growing up in Faerie, raised with love by human-eating water monsters and then tasked with keeping the evil changeling at bay back in the human world. But a few hundred years later a legend of a beautiful sleeping maiden still endures, and a quiet, calm and very polite knight appears in Toadling’s life, disturbing the years and years spent carrying out her self-imposed sentence of guarding the evil.
“There’s a very high wall,” said Halim, “according to the imams, called al-A’raf. Between hell and paradise. And if you haven’t been good enough or evil enough to go one place or the other, you live in this wall. But even those people will eventually enter paradise, because God is merciful.” He jammed his chin onto his fist and gazed at Toadling. “It seems like you’ve been stuck in that wall for quite a long time now … That’s all the theology I’ve got in me, incidentally, so I hope it’s useful.”
Toadling sighed. “I would like to climb down from that wall,” she admitted.
“Well, then.”
It’s a quiet and calm story mostly built on thoughtful introspection, guilt and regret. And resignation to fate that follows seeming inability to change things for the better with love, kindness and sensible hard work. It’s the bittersweet kind of sweetness here and not that of the sugary cotton candy variety that I can’t stand. It flows well, and as usual, Kingfisher/Vernon does some impressive magic with her seemingly easy and unforced writing that makes the words fall just right.
I enjoyed it way more than I expected to. I’m usually not too keen on retellings (even from Kingfisher herself), but this one is very much it’s own story of guilt and regret just leaning on the framework of a fairytale, and that’s alright with me.
4.5 thorny stars.
books are life 