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BOOK REVIEW: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: Thornhedge, by T. KingfisherTitle: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Published by Tor
Published: August 15, 2023
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 116
Format: ARC
Source: Edelweiss
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

Thornhedge is the tale of a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.

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…

 Everything I’ve ready by T. Kingfisher has been excellent, and Thornhedge is a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I keep thinking about even though I read it back in June. This reimagines Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the ‘evil fairy’ of the tale we’re probably most familiar with, and it’s a twist I enjoyed a lot, especially now having read one of her The Saint of Steel paladin romances. Toadling, our fairy who has cursed the princess, was taken by the fairies at birth and given her name by the greenteeth and taught by the hare goddess.

The story opens after two hundred years of Toadling standing sentry of the castle surrounded by a thorn hedge, protecting what’s inside and protecting the world outside. She meets Halim, a soft-spoken paladin who tells her that he ‘mostly came for answers or maybe just the story,’ and the entire book is a reflection on the how truth becomes a story and how story holds threads of truths, and how we reconcile that with ourselves.

Even though the worldbuilding seems small, it is constrained by Toadling’s own view of the world, stuck in the same area for over two centuries and no real interaction with anyone over those two decades until Halim the paladin makes the effort. It wraps up neatly, with sharp violence contrasting with a sense of comfort, but it left me wanting more set in this world and more about Halim, more about Toadling, more fairy tales reimagined in such a way. This has a similar vibe to Paladin’s Grace, so if you enjoy the softer, slower, cozier kind of story that explores something in a vast world from a limited perspective, then I’d recommend The Saint of Steel series that I’m currently reading.

Overall, this is one of my favorites of the year, and one of my favorite reimaginings of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.

BOOK REVIEW: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John MandelTitle: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Published by Knopf Publishing Group
Published: April 5th 2022
Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction
Pages: 272
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher, Edelweiss
Goodreads

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Sea of Tranquility continues and adds to the story and world Mandel explores in Station Eleven. While this book can certainly stand on its own, there is a richness added to it if you have already read Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. Each of the stories are connected, as if Mandel is creating a kind of multiverse, and each of the stories explore characters making the best of things in the worst of times. 

Sea of Tranquility is a matryoshka of interconnected stories, each connected by a singular event occurring at different points in time. The first story takes place in 1912, in which Edwin, the exiled son of an English family, ends up on the Island of Caiette on which he has a strange experience in a forest with visions of a station of some kind and a violin. The second story occurs in 2020, in which Mirelle wants to discover the mystery behind a glitch in a video that is set in a forest and set to violin music. The third story occurs in the future, in which Olive has published a book in which there are scenes echoing the experiences of Edwin and Mirabelle with the forest and the violin. When she meets a man named after the main character in her book, Olive’s life is turned upside down, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts discovers more about his purpose and the nature of reality. 

One thing I have truly enjoyed about Mandel’s writing is that it’s quiet, it builds up to something more almost without you realizing it’s happening, and the end results, to me anyway, are satisfying and emotionally resonant. I reread Station Eleven this year, and it’s strange to revisit a pandemic novel during an actual pandemic, but there’s a lot of hope in it, hope that there is something greater in humanity to overcome the strangeness of life. Sea of Tranquility is about finding out what it means to belong, how technology affects us throughout the years, and is wistful, wishful, adding onto that hope that even though in the future we’ll face pandemics, strife, and fear, it’s connected. We’re all connected.

Many thanks to Knopf Publishing Group and Edelweiss for the eARC! All opinions are my own.

BOOK REVIEW: The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine ChanTitle: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Published by Simon & Schuster
Published: January 4th 2022
Genres: Fiction, Dystopia
Pages: 336
Format: ARC
Source: Edelweiss, Publisher
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance.

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.

Until Frida has a very bad day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

A searing page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic.

 Chan’s The School for Good Mothers is a reflection on the government’s hold on social services, children, and women’s bodies/lives. In a similar vein of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the events in this book teeter on our society’s imminent future, serving as both a criticism and a warning. 

Frida’s marriage has crumbled at the birth of her daughter, her ex-husband leaving her for another woman, and she is struggling coming to terms with her new life as a mother and an ex-wife. She leaves her daughter home alone for a couple of hours, to go to work, to escape the tedious and difficult reality, and she finds herself entangled with Child Protective Services as a result of her misjudgment. 

She knew it was wrong to leave her child behind, knew it was not the best choice, and she hopes for some sympathy in her break in good judgment when the agency reviews her case. Frida is told that there is a new program being offered for reform for these “bad mothers,” and she is sent off to a reform school just outside the city with other mothers who have also made bad judgments for their children (ranging from relatively mild to extreme).

These schooled mothers are now under constant observation and evaluation with childlike animatronic dolls that record the mothers’ every move. Privileges are taken away if the mothers don’t adhere to strict rules and performances. The surveillance has an undercurrent of violence that is difficult to ignore, especially in contrast to the school for fathers that is seemingly much more relaxed.

The concept of a “perfect mother” can be incredibly damaging to anyone trying to live up to societal expectations, and especially to those with depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues that can interfere with day to day life, activities, and care. Lapses in judgment can happen to any of us, but how is a year’s worth of strict instruction and surveillance a better course of action than compassion and resources for parents navigating the raising of children? How are we to consider motherhood today, especially considering the shift of raising children from being a family/community task to being the task of a nuclear, “traditional” family with the figurehead being the mother? How are we to consider the “ideal motherhood” that’s rooted in heteronormative Western whiteness in contrast to the way in which other cultures view motherhood, parenthood, and the raising of a family?

Written in a clinical, stark style that fully showcases the horror simmering underneath the surface of the perception of perfect motherhood, The School for Good Mothers is a chilling, disturbing read that begs a second consideration of what it means to be a mother, what’s expected of mothers, and how we perceive motherhood in our society.

Review copy from Simon & Schuster via Edelweiss, thank you!

BOOK REVIEW: A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. HarrowTitle: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow
Series: Fractured Fables #1
Published by Tordotcom
Published: October 5th 2021
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 128
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher, Work
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

USA Today bestselling author Alix E. Harrow's A Spindle Splintered brings her patented charm to a new version of a classic story.

It's Zinnia Gray's twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it's the last birthday she'll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no one has lived past twenty-one.

Her best friend Charm is intent on making Zinnia's last birthday special with a full sleeping beauty experience, complete with a tower and a spinning wheel. But when Zinnia pricks her finger, something strange and unexpected happens, and she finds herself falling through worlds, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate.

Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered has been touted as fairy tales meets Into the Spider-Verse, and I can’t agree more with the comps. For all its historical and narrative weirdness, Sleeping Beauty is one of my favorite fairy tales. I love the Disney animated version, I fell in love with Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End, and I got my hands on as many retellings of Sleeping Beauty in any length and form.

The first of a novella duology, A Spindle Splintered follows Zinnia Gray, a young woman born with a fatal condition due to an industrial accident, who finds comfort in the stories of Sleeping Beauty. She, too, thinks of herself as cursed, and falling asleep, only to wake to true love, is just the sort of comfort she needs at a time where her own world is figuratively and literally breaking down

Charm, Zinnia’s best friend, throws a Sleeping Beauty-themed party on her twenty-first birthday, and Zinnia touches a spindle that sends her to a medieval fairy tale world in which she meets Briar Rose, the traditional titular character in a Sleeping Beauty story with which we’re all familiar. From there, the story takes off on its multiverse bent, exploring and shattering tropes and genre expectations that turns the entire concept of a multiverse fairy tale world into a page-turning read. I loved the nods to the fairy tale retelling writers I grew up with, and all of the nods to fairy tale tropes in general.

If you enjoy fairy tales and their retellings, A Spindle Splintered needs to be on your TBRs.

BOOK REVIEW: I’m Waiting For You and Other Stories, by Kim Bo-Young

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: I’m Waiting For You and Other Stories, by Kim Bo-YoungTitle: I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories by Kim Bo-young, Sophie Bowman, Sung Ryu
Published by Harper Voyager
Published: April 6th 2021
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 336
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher, Work
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

“Her fiction is a breath-taking piece of a cinematic art itself. Reminiscent of the world we experienced in Matrix, Inception, and Dark City, still it leads us to this entirely original structure, which is a ground-breaking, mystic literary and cinematic experience. Indeed, powerful and graceful.”—Bong Joon-ho, Oscar-winning director of Parasite

Two worlds, four stories, infinite possibilities 
In this mind-expanding work of speculative fiction, available in English for the first time, one of South Korea’s most treasured writers explores the driving forces of humanity—love, hope, creation, destruction, and the very meaning of existence—in two pairs of thematically interconnected stories.
In “I’m Waiting for You” and “On My Way,” an engaged couple coordinate their separate missions to distant corners of the galaxy to ensure—through relativity—they can arrive back on Earth simultaneously to make it down the aisle. But small incidents wreak havoc on space and time, driving their wedding date further away. As centuries on Earth pass and the land and climate change, one thing is constant: the desire of the lovers to be together. In two separate yet linked stories, Kim Bo-Young cleverly demonstrate the idea love that is timeless and hope springs eternal, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges and the deepest despair.

In “The Prophet of Corruption” and “That One Life,” humanity is viewed through the eyes of its creators: godlike beings for which everything on Earth—from the richest woman to a speck of dirt—is an extension of their will. When one of the creations questions the righteousness of this arrangement, it is deemed a perversion—a disease—that must be excised and cured. Yet the Prophet Naban, whose “child” is rebelling, isn’t sure the rebellion is bad. What if that which is considered criminal is instead the natural order—and those who condemn it corrupt? Exploring the dichotomy between the philosophical and the corporeal, Kim ponders the fate of free-will, as she considers the most basic of questions: who am I?

 This collection of intertwined short stories is so meticulously well done that I need to read everything else by Bo-Young. It’s not apparent from the get-go that these stories are connected because it starts out small, goes to the outer limits of the universe, and comes back around, but the way in which these are connected are so human at times in a way that only science fiction seems to be able to do.

Kim Bo-Young’s collection is something I’d recommend to you if you read and enjoyed Ted Chiang’s or Ken Liu’s writing as it has the very human, philosophical quality found in their works because no matter how far we as humans remove ourselves from the planet Earth – physically, emotionally, or spatially – there is always something calling us back.

From the letters and communication between two lovers trying to coordinate their paths through space and time to the overwatch of celestial beings on humanity, each of these stories makes you believe in something considered both small and big in the grand scheme of the universe – love, life, and hope. And those three things are often what truly matter in the grand scheme of things. The day-to-day choices that bring us closer together, no matter what the universe has in store for us all.

This comes highly recommended from me, and it’s definitely one of my favorite reads of the year.

Many thanks to Harper Voyager for a review copy! All opinions are my own.