Juv Fantasy: The Castle Behind Thorns, Merrie Haskell

The Castle Behind Thorns
Merrie Haskell
ISBN: 9780062008190
A lush and leisurely re-working of Sleeping Beauty set in Brittany in 1518, with saints and magic and themes of family betrayal, friendship, trust, and forgiveness.
Read December 28, 2014

Lovely to read through, but it will be a very specific middle-grade reader to appreciate the vocabulary, dense thematic structure, and really superbly slow narrative pace.  It's fun for me as an adult, as a fast reader, and as someone who appreciates fairy-tale re-workings and historical fiction, but I think that it might easily fail to grab attention.

Sand (great name for a smith) wakes up in a fireplace, and realizes he's in the Sundered Castle, which has been hidden behind thorns since his father was a child.  The castle is still hidden behind thorns, but now they are keeping him prisoner as well.

I'll try to remain vague to avoid spoiling everything.

I loved the slow build of exploration and discovery.

I loved the focus on mending and repairing, especially how it relates to the other characters.

I loved the unapologetic hatred towards war and violence.

I loved the way that forgiveness was presented - not as a religious or civic duty, but as an act of self-preservation and personal mental/emotional health.

I loved the mending magic, the saints, and the Greek afterlife complete with Lethe, shades, and pomegranate seeds.

I loved Sand's enormous complicated blacksmithing solution.

I loved that the resolution was prosaic and mundane and that the "punishment" for the guilty was self-inflicted (although that was a little too perfectly settled, and I really feel for that priest and those poor knights).


The author has another fairy-tale re-working (12 Dancing Princesses) that I have almost picked up several times and just never felt like it grabbed me: The Princess Curse.  Now that I've read this one and have high opinions of the language and writing style, I might give that one a try even if the storyline itself doesn't seem as personally interesting.

Curse of the Thirteenth Fey, Jane Yolen

Curse of the Thirteenth Fey, Jane Yolen
ISBN: 9780399256646
Read November 20, 2013

YA: Sleeping Beauty re-tell from the perspective of the fairy "godmothers" although the sleeper is a fae also...

Weird.  I think that I would have enjoyed it more if I had been allowed to come to the realization that this was a Sleeping Beauty re-telling more gradually and naturally over the course of the story, instead of having it plastered on the cover.

Because to be quite honest, it ISN'T the story of Sleeping Beauty. Unless you accept that the story of Sleeping Beauty that we all know was mangled all out of shape and smushed into a container that didn't quite fit it all, and then dumped out somewhere quite different and mixed up with some extra bits from who-knows-where.

To that end, I have a hard time reviewing this.  Is it a good re-work of Sleeping Beauty?  For me, nope.  It was weird, focused on the fae end of things, didn't really have that mystical fairy-tale feel, and too many of the classic elements were missing or occluded.

Was it a good story of itself?  Actually, yes.  I liked Gorse, I liked the mythology of their strange Appalachian-seeming hippie-fae family, I liked all the sibling interactions, and I really really liked the bits in the dark with the Grey and the Prince.  Those bits strongly reminded me of The Perilous Gard (Elizabeth Marie Pope) which I read a while back.  I really like creepity fae that take advantage of darkness and odd motivations.

So I'm not sure about it.  My suggestion?  Try not to think about classic fairy-tales when you read it, and just enjoy a strange, somewhat nigglingly-familiar story about a clumsy and unlucky 13th child of the fae, and what happened a long time ago, when she was a child.