Kingdom of Thorns

The last page I read before closing the file was the epilogue. It finishes with the two main characters growing old together and ruling their kingdom after a long life. I shut the laptop and sat back on the sofa. I wondered exactly who I would hand this book to. I need to mention right now that I am going to discuss how this ends and the big twist of who the guide actually is. If you care about surprises, stop reading this here.

I am starting at the end because that is where the whole operation finally settles. Before they grow old, they have a wedding. This follows the moment the prince breaks the curse by stabbing the evil fairy's sleeping body and kissing the princess awake. It takes an incredibly long time to get there. Sometimes, it feels like a warehouse shift that stretches three hours past the scheduled finish.

The premise is simple on paper. A dark fairy curses a kingdom to sleep for a hundred years. A young prince, Leopold, goes into a deadly forest to break the curse. He rings a bell and meets a guide named Talia. The twist, which is revealed late in the journey, is that the guide is actually the princess. She is projecting her spirit out of her sleeping body.

That is a clever mechanism. It solves the operational problem of a protagonist who spends a century unconscious. Instead of doing nothing, she spends those years learning the forest. She fights alongside a group of bandits. She watches her friends grow old and die while she remains frozen in time.

But clever mechanisms require rules. This is where the book loses me. For most of the journey, Talia cannot touch anything. She cannot eat, she cannot sleep, and she certainly cannot touch the prince. She is essentially a ghost with a visible form. She is bound by the magic of a fairy pendant.

Then, Leopold is bitten by a venomous snake. He needs the poison sucked out of his leg. Suddenly her body solidifies enough to do it. The book vaguely explains this as the curse nearing its end. To me, it reads like a delivery schedule changed after the truck has already left the ramp. When the rules bend just because the hero is dying, the danger stops feeling real.

Still, there are things here that genuinely work. Leopold is not the typical arrogant prince. He is the second son. He is sent into the woods because his older brother is needed at home. Leopold is terrified of giant spiders. He complains about the mud. He nearly drowns crossing a river on a slippery log.

I appreciated this detail. Too often in these stories, a young man swings a sword for twelve hours and never needs a bandage. Leopold actually requires rest. The book tracks his physical deterioration as they push deeper into the cursed woods. His exhaustion has visible consequences on his ability to fight.

The logistics of their travel are also relatively sound early on. They check their supplies. They measure daylight. Talia uses old caches of herbs and potions she hid decades ago. I like a character who prepares for an emergency before it happens. It shows competence.

But the pacing is wildly inconsistent. The middle of the book is an endless sequence of monster encounters. Giant spiders, ogres, sirens in a lake, a resurrected basilisk, fear-witches, enchanted vines, and even a dream-demon called a djinn.

After the third near-death experience, the tension flattens completely. You cannot keep throwing monsters at the characters and expect the reader to remain anxious. It becomes a checklist. Here is the spider, tick the box. Here is the ogre, tick the box. The danger loses its weight because you know they will survive it.

Then there are the flashbacks. Half the narrative is spent looking backward. We see how Talia trained with a group of bandits before the curse took effect. These sections show her learning to fight and befriending a boy named Ezio.

These sections are meant to make us care about the men she eventually loses to old age. Instead, they drag the forward momentum to a dead halt. Just as Leopold and Talia are facing a crisis in the forest, we are pulled back a hundred years. We watch a teenage princess learn to chop wood.

I found myself skimming the bandit chapters. I was waiting to get back to the actual logistics of the forest crossing. The emotional payoff of Anton and Benedict dying of old age is supposed to be devastating. But because we only see them in disconnected fragments, the grief feels engineered rather than earned.

Which brings me back to the question of who this book is for. I read fiction, but I prefer it grounded. I enjoyed A Man Called Ove because the character operated on a logic I understood. I can enjoy fantasy if the internal accounting balances and the rules remain fixed from start to finish.

Here, the accounting is messy at best. The villain, the Thirteenth Fairy, is cartoonishly evil. She shows up occasionally in dreams to taunt Leopold. But her motivations are incredibly shallow. She wants revenge because the queen made a bad bargain at a wishing well. She seems perfectly happy to destroy an entire kingdom over it.

You never understand the mechanics of her power. She can summon a horde of undead skeletons from a lake. But she cannot simply crush the prince when he is standing right in front of her. She relies on monologues when she should be acting. I do not trust a manager who talks about what they are going to do instead of simply doing it.

The final confrontation is particularly frustrating. Leopold hacks his way through a wall of thorns, runs past a basilisk, and stabs the fairy's sleeping body with a magical dagger. It happens so quickly that the preceding chapters of dread feel entirely unearned. The climax is over before you can even register the threat.

Yet, despite all of these structural complaints, I finished the book. I stayed awake reading it when I should have been checking tomorrow's capacity reports for the warehouse. Why? Because the central relationship actually justifies the time spent on it.

Leopold and Talia spend days talking to each other. They do not just fall into bed. Her lack of a physical body prevents it anyway. Instead, they discuss their fears, their families, and their insecurities. When Leopold finally kisses her awake, it feels like an arrangement two people agreed to, rather than a prize awarded to a victor.

The author writes in an afterword that she wanted to give the princess agency. She wanted to remove the aspect of a man simply walking up to an unconscious woman and kissing her without permission. In that specific operational goal, the execution succeeds entirely.

Talia chooses Leopold. She tests him. She watches how he treats others. She measures his character before she allows herself to care for him. She sees that he spared his knights from the danger, prioritizing their lives over his own glory. I respect a protagonist who demands proof of competence before handing over responsibility.

My verdict is split. I cannot recommend this to someone who reads fantasy for strict magic systems or clear world-building. The rules here bend whenever the plot requires them to. The world only exists to challenge the prince.

However, someone looking for a romance built on mutual respect and shared endurance will likely have much more patience for it than I did. The emotional journey succeeds where the physical logistics fail.

For me, the discrepancies were a constant irritation. I want the quantities to match the delivery note. I want the magic to follow the rules established in chapter one. It annoyed me every time the logic broke down to save the characters from a bad situation.

But I can acknowledge when a job is completed. The book delivers the emotional payoff it promises, even if the route taken was inefficient. I reached the end, but I was relieved when the shift was finally over.

Look, the binding marriage is not the interesting failure mode. I am going to talk about who Talia is, about the graves behind the den, and about the kiss in the tower, so if you want those intact you should stop. I finished the book because the two people at the center keep making decisions I can inspect. Prince Leopold volunteers so his older brother does not have to marry a stranger, then he leaves his knights at the inn because the last group of ten came back as three. Talia meets him at the forest bell with three conditions: follow her instructions, drop questions she cannot answer, and do not touch her. Not a handshake. Nothing. That is not flavor text. That is the operating rule of the novel, and it is why I stayed with them through spiders, ogres, sirens, and a century of workarounds that should not have been necessary.

Leo is the second prince and he knows it. He is trained, not exceptional, and the book does not pretend otherwise. He slips off a mossy log into rapids. He freezes in front of a spider the size of a horse until Talia baits it up the rock. He gets clubbed by an ogre and tries to delay the pot by asking whether they salted the water. That last bit is the kind of improvisation I believe. He is not Wilheim, and he says so often enough that it should have worn thin, except the story keeps putting him in situations where the stronger brother would have been the wrong tool. He dismisses the escort because George’s wife is finally expecting and he does not want another empty chair. The risk math is sloppy. The ethic is not. When men in the tavern talk about winning a princess he snaps that a person is not a prize. When Talia later tests him with the party of men who joked about “having fun” before waking the sleeper, he says he would have left them too. That is the failing case I needed. A lot of retellings tell you the hero is decent. This one shows him refusing a specific, ugly default, including the one that would have made his own quest easier.

Talia is the more interesting operator of the two, and I mean that in the unglamorous sense. She has caches of anti-venom and charms dotted through the woods. She reads arrows cut into oaks. She does not eat in front of him. She sings to river nymphs for fish and will not let him throw his life in front of hers because he is “the last hope we have of ending this,” which is a sentence that only makes sense once you know she is not a contractor. In the other timeline Briar is ten when a courtier counts down the years out loud. She corners her parents, refuses the lie, and demands a swordmaster plus mental training so a fairy cannot walk her to the spindle. Castle knights will not hit a princess properly, so she follows a raid into the woods and hires bandits. She pays them. She chops wood until she can hold a broadsword overhead for a minute. She learns poisons from Benedict because she intends to kill Thirteen herself. That is not agency as a slogan. That is a teenager treating a curse as a system with inputs she can still change. I kept thinking about inherited access. Eleanora promised “anything” at the wishing well. The dark fairy invoices the firstborn. The good fairies cannot undo, only soften death into a hundred-year sleep and a kiss from a noble heart. Briar’s childhood is an attempt to write an exception before the deadline.

The no-touch rule is what made the romance work for me, which is not a sentence I expected to write about Sleeping Beauty. After she talks about watching people die, he wants to hold her. She wants it and still says no. He puts his hand beside hers and leaves the gap. In the Fear Marshes he breaks her first rule because he hears her scream, then admits he cares about her too much, which is the opposite of the self-deprecation he uses as cover. A vine creature drags him off. A djinn feeds him a perfect restored den where Talia is endlessly kind, the graves are gone, and there is nothing in the world but the two of them. He wakes himself because the real woman would have insulted him. The fake happily-ever-after fails because it violates her personality. That is a character test I respect. After he is free she still tries to send him home. Thirteen is getting stronger, she says, and he is not enough. Then a snake bites him and she cannot simply fetch the antidote the way a living guide would. She sucks venom, ties his belt as a tourniquet, and stays through days of fever. He feels her cold hands. She cannot feel his heat. When she finally tells him she is the princess, that the walnut locket is a glamour, that she has been an astral projection for a century so she could vet whoever came to wake her, he is not angry. He is relieved. He had been terrified of succeeding and having to marry someone who was not her. That is the honest version of true love here. It is not destiny. It is preference under a bad contract.

I am not usually patient with found-family montages, but the bandit chapters earn the later graves. Anton, Rogan, Lorenzo, Benedict, Ezio. They steal the Curse-Sharer dagger from Lorenzo’s father so Briar can force Thirteen to share the sleep. On the night of her seventeenth birthday the fairy freezes the real maid Talia with a knife at her throat. Briar takes the spindle in exchange, then stabs the fairy and falls. She names her projection after the maid and goes back to work. The forest years should have dragged. Mostly they did not, because each death is a process failure she cannot fix. Rogan dies of snakebite while she cannot carry him. Ezio grows up loving her, kisses the sleeping body without permission, fails, and leaves after a wish at the well. Lorenzo goes after a knight who does not want the princess. Benedict drinks the potion he prepared for the end. Anton dies between two crosses holding the first ruby she ever paid him, and she cannot bury him. A century later Leo digs the hole, ties two branches into a marker, and washes the dirt off his hands. That sequence is why I believed her fear of liking him. She is not mysterious. She is someone who has run out of people and still appears when the bell rings.

The last third is messier and I still wanted it. Her projection starts to solidify when he needs her. She can touch him and still feels almost nothing. They kiss in a sleeping house during a storm and nothing happens, which is the correct result: the clause is on the body in the tower, not the echo in the woods. Thirteen has learned astral projection too. That is convenient in a fairy-logic way and also the only remaining move that matches Briar’s. Talia offers her own death if the kingdom wakes and Leo lives. He gets dumped into a waterway with a wound in his side. Fairies reduced to jars of light and three centaurs paying back a vial of anti-venom clear him a path. She takes a basilisk strike meant for him, fades, and he still has to cut into the nest and finish Thirteen with the same dagger. Then he kisses the girl on the bed. She answers to Talia. She says she loves him too. I am telling you the ending because the recommendation depends on it. The book does not swap her for a softer princess. The epilogue is long and tidy, with a wedding delayed by state business, children named for the bandits, and Ezio old because his wish was twisted into watching almost everyone die first. I rolled my eyes at the grandchild who runs off to the fairies. I did not feel cheated by the two of them. They remain the same people. She still teases. He still underestimates himself. They still climb ivy instead of waiting for a guarded door.

The prose is straightforward. The banter would not survive a real forest, and Leo announces that he is not good enough more times than a spec should repeat a known risk. Monsters arrive in tour order. The good fairies are a support team that appears when the ticket is urgent. I did not care much. I cared that Briar stayed up all night writing letters in case waking erased Talia, and that Leo read them and went to find her instead of treating memory loss as a clean reset. I cared that the royal proclamation is a bad incentive, promising a woman’s hand to whoever gets through, and that the book knows it and still lets them choose each other after they already have. If you need every sentence to carry extra meaning this will feel thin. If you want to watch two specific people refuse the default roles in a story that usually stores the woman as an object and the man as a key, this worked. I recommended it to myself by finishing it on a weeknight when I had no surplus attention, which is the only test I trust.

Would I argue with the hundred-year logistics? Yes. Supplies, aging, how an echo suddenly develops a pulse when the plot needs hands, the way Thirteen’s power scales whenever a chapter is slow. I argued with those while I was reading and I still turned the next page. Talia’s third condition is the line I remember. Do not touch me. Then, much later, touch me whenever you want. That is not a makeover. That is a permission change with a recorded reason, and it is the reason I would tell you to read it.

I fix broken lamps because they have a clear end point. You strip the wire, you replace the cardboard sleeve, you seat the socket, you flip the switch, and the light turns on. The problem has edges. Bedside nursing rarely offers that kind of neat resolution, which is why I turn to practical hobbies. I also turn to fairytales. I picked up Katherine Macdonald's Kingdom of Thorns expecting a straightforward mechanism: a kingdom gets cursed, a prince braves a forest, a kiss breaks the spell. The logistics are supposed to be simple. I wanted a comfortable, predictable reading experience where the problems have edges and the solutions actually work. What I got instead was a logistical nightmare orchestrated by a protagonist who deliberately engineers a century of trauma for everyone around her simply because she refused to surrender control of the process. I am going to talk about exactly how she manages this, which means I am going to spoil the astral projection twist, the fate of the bandits, and the ending. If you care about keeping those surprises intact, this is the place to stop. I kept reading past the halfway mark only because I wanted to see if the author realized how horrifying this plan actually was. She didn't. The book treats a catastrophic failure of planning as a triumph of female empowerment, and by the final chapter I was mostly just exhausted. The premise hinges on a cursed princess who decides that waiting for rescue is too passive, so she stabs the evil fairy with a magical dagger to share the sleeping curse, then projects her spirit out of her body to spend a hundred years wandering the forest as a guide named Talia. She does this entirely so she can personally vet the men who come to save her. It is presented as a brilliant assertion of agency. In reality, it is an administrative disaster with a body count.

Prince Leo arrives at the edge of the forest to break the curse. He is the second son of Germaine, stepping in for his older brother Wilheim because Wilheim is in love and Leo does not want to ruin his happiness. I actually liked Leo at first. He is practical enough to realize that bringing a dozen knights into a magical death trap will just get a dozen men with families killed, so he leaves them at a tavern and goes in alone. It is a terrible tactical plan, but his reasoning makes a bleak kind of sense. He rings a bell at the tree line, and Talia appears to guide him. She looks like a muddy forest dweller, completely hiding her royal identity, and she gives him a set of rigid conditions. She tells him to follow her instructions, forbids him from asking questions, and explicitly orders him not to touch her. I am familiar with people who use abrasive behavior to cover up fear, so I gave her a pass initially. I assumed she was just tired. I know what it looks like when someone builds a wall of competence to keep people from realizing how close they are to breaking. But Talia is not just building a wall. She is conducting a lethal performance review.

They set off into the woods, and the forest immediately becomes a tedious checklist of mythical hazards rather than a cohesive environment. It does not feel like an ecosystem. It feels like a video game where someone just kept spawning random enemies to pad the runtime. Here is the giant spider section. Here is the ogre section. Here is the siren lake. Here is the fear marsh. Leo trips, falls, gets battered, and nearly drowns in rapids. Talia mostly watches. She occasionally yells at him to run faster or warns him not to look at things, but she does not sleep and she does not eat. When Leo asks reasonable questions about his survival, she snaps at him. Withholding information is not leadership, and it is certainly not a reliable method for keeping someone alive, but the book frames her hostility as charming banter. She berates him for risking his life to save hers during the spider attack, entirely because she knows she cannot actually die, but she refuses to tell him that.

Despite her constant refusal to actually explain what is happening or offer any real comfort, Leo decides he is falling in love with her. I did not believe it for a single second. He is terrified, physically exhausted, and utterly dependent on her for his survival in a hostile environment. That is not a foundation for romance. That is a hostage situation. He keeps telling her she is perfect and wonderful. She is neither of those things. She is a withholding manager who gets annoyed when her completely uninformed subordinate fails to anticipate the next disaster. The only reason he thinks he loves her is because she has a pretty singing voice and occasionally stops insulting him long enough to look sad by a campfire. The book tries to sell this as a meeting of noble hearts, but it reads like a trauma bond.

Then comes the twist. Leo gets attacked by a dream demon that traps him in a pleasant hallucination while draining his life force. Talia lures a basilisk to kill the demon, and in the aftermath, she finally confesses the truth. She is Briar-Rose. She has been an astral projection for a century. She cannot touch him because she is a ghost, anchored to a fairy pendant she wore when she went to sleep. The only reason she is out here is to ensure that whoever breaks the curse is someone she actually respects. Let that sink in. She doomed herself to wander a forest of monsters for a hundred years just to conduct a lethal interview process for her suitors. She calls it taking control of her destiny. I call it an appalling lack of foresight.

The sheer cruelty of this arrangement becomes apparent when the book flashes back to her time before the curse. Briar decided she wanted to learn how to fight, so she hired a group of bandits living in the woods. When the curse fell, she told these bandits about her astral projection plan. Because they cared about her, they refused to leave the forest. They stayed to protect her projection and to guide other would-be heroes. Briar let them stay. She watched them age while she remained a timeless spirit. She watched the dwarf Rogan die of a snakebite, powerless to drag him back to camp because her hands passed through his body. She watched the apothecary Benedict wither away from illness. She watched the leader Anton die of old age beside their graves. She subjected herself to the trauma of watching her friends slowly perish over decades, and she subjected them to a life of bleak isolation in a monster-infested wasteland, all so she would not have to be alone while she waited.

It gets worse when you consider Ezio. Ezio was a young boy living with the bandits. He grows up alongside Talia's ghost, and because they spend years hunting and reading together, he falls in love with her. He realizes he cannot touch her and begs her to let him try to wake her. Talia refuses because she does not love him back. Desperate, Ezio goes to the castle alone, braves the thorns, and kisses her sleeping body anyway. It does not work. Defeated and heartbroken, he leaves the forest and wastes a magical wish at a corrupt wishing well just to ensure she finds happiness. Briar mourns his departure, but she never seems to grasp the sheer selfishness of her design. She kept these people anchored to her tragedy. She consumed their lives to pad her waiting period, treating their devotion as a comforting backdrop to her own misery.

And what about the other heroes? Briar admits she guided hundreds of men into the woods over the century. If she deemed them unworthy, which she always did because none of them met her impossibly high standards for a noble heart, she just led them on long routes until they gave up, or they died. She watched people get crushed, eaten, and impaled by the thorns. The book wants us to view this as a tragic burden she bravely shoulders, a noble sacrifice she makes to protect her kingdom from unworthy rulers. I view it as gross negligence. If you are going to set up a lethal obstacle course, you are responsible for the people who die running it. She could have stayed in the castle and slept, letting the fairies handle the perimeter. Instead, she turned the forest into an open grave.

The medical logistics of the third act finally broke my patience entirely. Leo gets bitten by a basilisk. He is in agony, burning up with venom, his leg swelling, on the verge of death. Talia, who previously could not touch anything, suddenly finds she can interact with the physical world because she loves him so much. She literally sucks the venom out of his leg and ties a tourniquet with his belt. That is not how venom works, and a tourniquet on a snakebite is a fantastic way to ensure the patient loses the limb, but fine, we are in a fairytale. What genuinely irritated me was the emotional framing of the scene. Leo is the one actively dying, sweating and vomiting in the mud, and the narrative focuses entirely on Talia’s emotional distress. She yells at him not to die because it would hurt her too much. It is incredibly self-centered. Her grief is treated as the primary emergency, rather than the fact that his organs are shutting down.

After a few days of Talia shoving random potions down his throat, Leo is miraculously able to walk again. He is still weak, but they press on because they are running out of time before the hundred years are up. They have to hack through a literal wall of thorns that stretches for miles. The author describes his exhaustion, his bleeding hands, and his failing lungs, but it never feels grounded in actual physical reality. He is pushed far past the point of physiological collapse, yet he always finds the energy to make one more witty remark or tell Talia how beautiful she is. When the thorns grab Talia, he manages to sprint, slash through thick vines, and launch her up a stone wall. Pain in this book is just a prop used to demonstrate Leo’s nobility. It has no actual weight. A real person recovering from a necrotic venom bite does not suddenly develop the stamina of an Olympic athlete just because his girlfriend is in danger.

They reach the castle, and the plot escalates into pure nonsense. The evil fairy, Thirteen, is somehow projecting her own spirit now, because apparently anyone can do it if the plot demands it. She resurrects the dead basilisk as a zombie snake. A squad of fairies and centaurs show up out of nowhere to hold off the monster army, turning the quiet, isolating curse into a chaotic battlefield. Talia throws herself in front of the zombie basilisk to save Leo, takes a fatal wound to the stomach, and fades back into her sleeping body. Leo has to sprint through the thorns, pull the dagger out of Thirteen’s sleeping body, and stab her with it. Then he crashes into the tallest tower, kisses Briar, and everyone wakes up. The mechanics of the curse are whatever they need to be in any given paragraph.

The aftermath is incredibly rushed. A century has passed. The kingdom wakes up and instantly adjusts. Briar’s parents just accept that their daughter has been awake as a ghost for a hundred years and is now marrying the boy who walked through the door five minutes ago. There is no trauma, no muscle atrophy from a century of lying in bed, no psychological fallout from the entire kingdom losing a hundred years of history. Wilheim arrives at the gates with an elderly Ezio, who is perfectly happy to see Briar marry someone else. Everything is wrapped up with a neat little bow. Briar and Leo get married, have children, and travel the world in disguise.

This is exactly why the book fails. It wants the aesthetic of suffering without the consequences. It wants us to admire Briar for her fierce independence and her willingness to suffer alongside her kingdom, but it refuses to hold her accountable for the misery she caused by refusing to just go to sleep. She wanted agency, but agency requires accepting the outcomes of your decisions. Her decision got people killed. Her decision forced her friends to die in the dirt. But because Leo kissed her and said he loved her, all of that is swept aside for a royal wedding. The narrative never forces her to reckon with the fact that her empowerment was entirely subsidized by the blood of the people who tried to help her.

I fix things because I like to see them work properly. I like systems that make sense, where actions have logical reactions and responsibility is actually assigned where it belongs. The system in this book is broken from the moment Briar decides to manage her own curse. She is not a strong heroine. She is a liability. The author mistook control for empowerment, and dragged a perfectly serviceable fairy tale through the mud to prove a point that never lands. A good discharge plan needs to survive the trip home. A good protagonist needs to survive the weight of her own choices. Briar does not do either. I closed the file feeling nothing but relief that I would never have to spend another minute in her company.

The first thing worth describing is the structure, because it's the most interesting decision Macdonald makes. The book runs two timelines in alternating chapters. In one, Prince Leo of Germaine treks through an enchanted forest to wake a princess he has never met, guided by a sharp-tongued woman called Talia. In the other, starting seven years earlier, Princess Briar-Rose overhears about the curse on her own head and spends her teenage years preparing to fight it. The two lines run towards each other and meet at the spindle, which is tidy. I'll be talking about the whole book here, including who Talia is and how it ends, so if you'd rather go in cold, this is where you stop.

The premise underneath is a fix for the problem with Sleeping Beauty, which is that the princess has nothing to do. This one has plenty to do. Briar trains with a swordmaster, badgers a fairy tutor into teaching her to resist mind control, hires bandits to teach her dirty fighting, and when the curse finally lands she does not take it lying down. Or not only lying down. She stabs the fairy with a dagger that shares whatever curse the stabber is under, so the pair of them go down together. Then, through a borrowed bit of fairy magic, she projects her mind out of her sleeping body and spends the next century vetting the men who come to rescue her. That is the engine of the book, and it is a good one.

Right. The friction. Leo's timeline settles into a loop early and never leaves it. An obstacle appears, Leo nearly dies, Talia saves him or he saves her, they have a tender conversation by a fire, repeat. He falls in a river. He is nearly eaten by a giant spider, then by ogres, nearly drowned by sirens, nearly lost in a marsh that shows you your fears, nearly drained by a dream demon, nearly killed by a basilisk, then by a snake bite, then by thorns. The ogre episode especially; Leo buys time by telling them they really should season the pot, which is the sort of practical thinking I respect. But stacked together the perils flatten each other, and by the time the basilisk came back from the dead for the finale, my reaction was not dread. It was: again?

The bigger problem is that consequences keep getting unwound. The ogre gives Leo a head wound that should have him down for weeks; three fairies turn up and magic him right. Snake venom nearly kills him; there is an antidote, a four-day sleep, and he is walking again. At the climax he takes a thorn through the shoulder and the chief fairy heals him on the spot, so he is presentable for his future in-laws. I once told a customer their review would be done by Friday when Friday was only an internal target. A deadline that keeps moving stops meaning anything. Danger works the same way. If every wound is patched by the next convenient potion, wounds stop costing, and I stopped bracing for them.

The prose repeats itself too, often enough that I started keeping count. Feelings get announced, then announced again in different words. After the spider, Leo is 'still furious' three times in one paragraph. His insides turn to jelly, then to molten lava, then to hot fiery putty, all in the middle third of the book. Talia's eyes are 'like silver spoons, wide and shining', which I read three times and still cannot picture. One exchange, 'What?' answered by 'What?', appears word for word twice in the same chapter. Everyone grins, smirks, winks or blushes on every page. It is not bad writing, exactly. It is writing that does not trust you to have got it the first time.

My lowest point was the dream demon's trap, because the book tells you it is a dream and then stays there for a long stretch. Leo works out something is wrong because the dream version of Talia is too nice, which is a clever tell, I will give it that. But we get pages of idyllic domestic fantasy, swimming and stew and kissing, while he half-remembers there is something he has forgotten. I found it a faff, because chapters that announce their own unreality and then ask you to invest anyway are asking a lot. The escape is well judged: he chooses the real, prickly Talia over the agreeable fake. It just takes an age to arrive.

So why keep going? The other timeline. Briar's chapters are better written and better paced, mostly because she has a goal beyond surviving the next monster. Her sneaking out of the castle in a maid's clothes to hire bandits as fight tutors is exactly the sort of daft, determined plan I can get behind. Her sixteenth birthday, where her mother fills the ball with suitors without asking, and she ends up drinking nymph nectar round a campfire with five criminals instead, is the best chapter in the book. And the spindle scene itself is tense: frozen guards, a knife at her friend's throat, and Briar playing weak until she is close enough to plant the dagger. 'Sleep with me, witch.' Earned, that line.

The strongest stretch, though, is the one I least expected: the hundred years. Once the curse lands, the book slows down and gets quieter and sadder. Her bandit family age and she does not. Rogan dies of a snake bite while she sings to him, unable even to hold his hand. Ezio, the boy she raised like a brother, grows up, falls in love with her, fails to wake her, and leaves. Lorenzo leaves. Benedict fades and chooses his own moment. Anton, the last of them, dies out by the graves, and she cannot even bury him; Leo does that for her, decades later. That whole section is about time and loss and the cost of keeping going, and it does something genuinely human rather than arranging the next set piece. It is the part that has stayed with me.

The book also earns credit for building its main idea into the rules. The counter-curse says only a particular kiss will wake her, and the story makes that mean something: Ezio kisses her and nothing happens, because she does not want him. The kiss works as consent, not as a key any passing prince can turn. There is a grim scene early on where a party of adventurers joke about what they would do to a sleeping woman who would never know, and Talia walks out on them in the night and leaves them to the forest. That is why she vets people. The premise holds because the book did the work. I would rather a story make its point through its mechanics than through a speech, and this one does.

There is decent craft in the setups. The old man in the tavern in chapter one, who walks Leo to the forest edge and tells him to stick close to the guide, turns out to be Ezio, decades on, kept alive by his own wish, twisted so he had to watch everyone go before him. It is planted early and pays off late, and when it landed I said something out loud, which my wife will confirm is rare. Same with the ruby Briar tosses the bandit leader at their first meeting: Leo finds it decades later, still in the skeleton's fist, and buries it with him. I spend my working week on reconciliations. I appreciate a book where the entries match.

Which makes the loose ends more irritating, because the book plainly can do better. The no-touching rule (no contact at all) holds for most of the story and then collapses the moment the plot needs Talia solid; the explanation is basically 'when Leo needed me', followed by a fairy calling it sweet, and we are waved on. There is a real maid called Talia whose name Briar borrowed, who gets half a line at the end and is whisked offstage so nobody has to deal with her. The swordmaster is Hakido in one chapter and Hikado in the next. Small things, but if you plant your payoffs that carefully, readers like me will notice when the version numbers do not match.

The romance itself I can take or leave, and I say that as someone the book half won over. They have known each other about three weeks when the dying-for-each-other starts, and the emotional volume is at full from early on, which leaves no headroom for the finale. Two concessions. First, she has had a hundred years of watching men fail to be worth it, so her certainty makes more sense than his. Second, the best romantic device in the book is not a speech, it is paperwork. The night before the deadline, Talia writes letters to her waking self, who may remember nothing, begging her not to forget the bandits and to give this man a chance. 'Be nicer to him this time. He truly was worth waiting for.' That is the moment the love story got me, and it is a list of instructions.

So it depends, and I mean that specifically. If you want a fairy-tale romance where the heroine has real agency, the banter runs hot and the feelings run hotter, and you are not going to mind the prose repeating itself or the hero bouncing off death every second chapter, this will do the job well. The bones are clever, the backstory is moving, and the ending plays fair. If, like me, you start counting repeated phrases and noting when the rules bend to fit the plot, you will be irritated often enough that the good stretches have to keep winning you back. They did win me back, to be fair. I finished it in four evenings. But I will not reread it, and I would only press it on someone I knew was the first sort of reader.

One last thing. There is an afterword where the author explains the themes: the nastier original tale, the consent point, the agency problem. It is honest and it is interesting, but the book had already made every one of those points itself, in the plot, where they belong. Trust the work. When the work is the bandits, and the hundred years, and a dagger in the dark, it is doing fine on its own.

The detail that will not leave me alone is a stack of handwritten letters. A young woman stays up the whole night before the morning that might erase her, writing notes to the person she will be when she wakes. The names of the people she lost. The things she did to get through a hundred years. The man she fell in love with, and one plea repeated until it sounds like prayer: do not forget. I should say plainly, before anything else, that I am about to discuss this entire book, including who the forest guide turns out to be and exactly how the ending works, so if you would rather learn those things on the page, stop here and come back when you have read it. The book is Kingdom of Thorns: A Sleeping Beauty Retelling, by Katherine Macdonald. I finished it three nights ago, and I keep expecting it to fade the way most of my weeknight reading fades by day two. It has not faded. The letters are why.

My reading life is unremarkable: I read in bed after the house goes quiet, six pages on a disciplined night, and lately my dog, who respects neither the lamp nor my 5:50 alarm, has been the only witness to this book keeping me up past the point where morning was going to hurt. My last finished books were The Thursday Murder Club and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, so a Sleeping Beauty retelling sounded like comfort food. What I got is better described as two books braided together. In one, Prince Leopold of Germaine walks into a cursed forest with a hired guide named Talia, bound for a castle where a princess has slept for a hundred years. In the other, set earlier, that same princess, Briar-Rose, spends the years before her seventeenth birthday doing everything a person can do to not need rescuing. The chapters alternate, and the structure is the book's first smart decision, because the reader learns long before the prince does who Talia actually is. She is the princess. The guide is the sleeping woman in the tower, walking the woods as a projected version of herself while her body lies behind the thorns. Once you know that, every scene between them does two jobs, and I got to watch the prince do the math about seventy pages behind me.

The princess half is the half I will recommend this book on. Briar learns about her curse at ten, because a courtier sighs 'only seven years left' within earshot, and her response is not tears. She corners her parents, refuses to be managed, and then asks for two things: a sword teacher, and someone to train her mind against compulsion, on the theory that if she will not touch a spindle of her own accord, someone will have to make her. She is ten. Her father bans spinning wheels from the castle and calls it a plan, and the book treats that the way I would: as one control on a risk that needs three. From there, Briar hires a band of forest thieves to teach her to fight without rules, because the fairy is unlikely to challenge her to a formal duel. She learns poisons and antidotes from a retired assassin. She sends her bandits on a two-week job to steal a specific dagger that can drag her curser into the curse beside her. And when a fairy offers a pendant that can cast her consciousness out of her sleeping body, with a plain warning that the consequences might break her heart, she reads the terms and signs anyway. I run employee relations for a living, and I am telling you, this woman runs her own curse like a case with a hard effective date. Two plans deep, specialists on retainer, everything documented. When the day comes, none of it saves her. It nearly does, and then it does not, and the failure is more interesting than success would have been, because everything she built becomes the machinery of the rest of the book.

The prince half works because Leo is not the best at anything. He is the second of three brothers, the expendable one by his own gloomy accounting, who volunteers so his older brother can marry the woman he loves and his fifteen-year-old brother does not have to go at all. He is afraid of spiders, hunted in his sleep by nightmares the fairy sends ahead of her, and he nearly dies often enough that I started a tally, which is a complaint I will come back to. What he is, is decent, in a way the book shows through behavior rather than announcement: he objects, out loud, every time someone calls the sleeping princess a prize. The romance is a slow build across weeks of walking, and its engine is her third rule. You don't touch me. It reads at first like a trauma tell, and the book lets you sit with that assumption before revealing the practical truth, which is that an astral projection has no body to touch. Then the rule starts breaking exactly when she needs it to, and by the time touch is possible, every instance of it is chosen. Even his nightmares serve the point: trapped in a dream of a perfect life with her, he escapes because he notices the dream version is too agreeable, that the real Talia would have insulted him by now. And the kiss mechanics are where this retelling shows its bones. A man who kisses her sleeping body without her wanting it fails, and we watch him fail. The kiss that finally works works because she chose the man and meant it. Consent here is not a theme the book mentions. It is the mechanism the plot runs on, written into the rules of the magic itself.

But the part that turned this from a pleasant retelling into a book I am still thinking about is the long middle, the hundred years. After the curse falls, Briar, now calling herself Talia after the maid she loves, becomes the forest's guide because she cannot leave and will not stop working. The bandits stay with her. Then the years do what years do. Rogan dies of a snakebite while she sings to him, unable to lift him, unable to cry with a body that is not real. Ezio, the orphan boy she taught to read, grows up, loves her, kisses her sleeping body without asking, fails, and leaves the forest after making a wish at the same well that started everything, and the wish twists the way that well's wishes do. Lorenzo follows a knight out of the trees toward his own life. Benedict declines the way old men decline and chooses his exit on a hard night. Anton, the leathery leader who once charged her jewels for fighting lessons, dies between the two graves she dug, still holding the first ruby she ever paid him. Decades later, Leo finds that ruby in a skeleton's fist and buries it with the bones, and I had to put the book down for a minute. There is also a scene the night before the curse, where Briar's mother climbs into her bed and admits she has been watching her sleep, because that is a thing mothers do. My daughter is seventeen, the age Briar is at the spindle, so I want to be honest that this book had me undefended before it ever reached the forest. This middle section understands something true about long emergencies: the crisis is not the hard part. The hard part is the coverage. Who stays. Who keeps the traps checked and the caches stocked when nobody is coming. Talia owns it for a century, and the book makes you feel the weight.

My complaints are real, and they are specific. The forest journey is episodic to a fault: danger, narrow escape, campfire conversation, repeat, and by the fifth cycle I could see the seams. Leo's near-deaths pile up until my tally became a distraction; a reader counting your fake-outs is not leaning forward. The prose sometimes shows me an emotion and then explains it in the next sentence, as if I cannot be trusted with the first pass. The modern slang scattered through a formal fairy tale, the 'smart ass' and the 'super specific,' charmed me nine times out of ten and jarred me the tenth. The villain has a motive but not much of an interior; she is mostly a function the plot needs, and I accepted her on those terms. And the final act, in which three good fairies are drained into jars and then rescued so they can serve as a support squad, is convenient in a way the rest of the book usually is not. None of this sank the book for me. All of it is visible without squinting.

Which brings me back to the letters. On the last night before the final day, with the kiss untested, Talia stays up writing to the Briar who will wake, because the counter-curse says she will rise as if no time has passed, and a hundred years is a lot of time to have pass. She is not only afraid of forgetting her friends. She is afraid of forgetting herself, the harder, funnier, more abrasive person the forest made, and the letters are her handover file to her own successor, who happens to be her own body. I have written coverage notes my whole career and I have never once written one to myself, and that is the detail that keeps opening back up. The ending pays the question off exactly right. The first thing the prince says over the sleeping woman is the forest name. Talia. And the first thing the waking princess says is the answer to the whole file: I love you too. She remembers. The file transferred. Then the book asks for consent one more time, at the proposal, because the rule of this world is that you ask. There is also a structural pleasure worth crediting: the old man in the chapter-one tavern who tells Leo to hire the guide is Ezio himself, grown ancient on his twisted wish, and it is he who leads Leo's brother through the trees at the end. The book plants its people early and pays them off late, and I notice planted payoffs, because my job is checking whether the paperwork matches the story. The epilogue names the children after the people she lost and turns the old den into a waystation for tired travelers, and someone who repairs damaged books at her kitchen table recognizes that move. You do not throw out the broken place. You make it useful again. In the afterword, Macdonald points to the oldest version of this tale, where the sleeping woman is named Talia and is assaulted in her sleep, and knowing that, the alias reads as a deliberate answer: this Talia gets to choose.

So. If you have ever wanted the sleeping princess to have a job in her own story, this is that book, and I am handing it to my daughter next, which is the strongest endorsement I give anything. If you need airtight plotting and cannot forgive a middle that walks in circles, it will test you the way it tested me, and it may win you the way it won me. It is not a tidy book. It is a generous one, built on the idea that a person should get a say in her own rescue. I read it in four evenings, and the dog and I both paid for the fifth morning. The letters are still open on the desk in my head. Do not forget Talia. I do not expect to.

If the dark fairy's curse specifically dictated that the princess would fall into a death-like sleep on her seventeenth birthday, and the good fairy modified it so she would wake up to a kiss from someone with a noble heart, where exactly in the magical rulebook does it state that a borrowed pendant can separate your consciousness so you can wander around as a muddy forest guide for a century? It is a massive technical workaround, and the book never really explains the load-bearing logic behind it. I am going to have to discuss the ending, the true identity of the forest guide, and the mechanics of how they defeat the fairy to explain how this book functions, so consider yourself warned if you care about spoilers. The narrative introduces this gaping loophole in its own magical constraints right at the end of the first act, and then simply expects you to accept that astral projection is a standard, unquestioned feature of the fairy ecosystem. You cannot just patch a curse with a necklace and refuse to explain the documentation.

It bothered me for the entire duration of the book.

I understand exactly why Katherine Macdonald did it. From a purely structural perspective, the original Sleeping Beauty is a terrible piece of narrative design. The main user of the story, the princess, is locked out of the system during the most important process. She has no agency, no awareness, and absolutely no say in who turns up to kiss her while she is unconscious. It is a fundamental flaw in the old tale. Macdonald’s fix is to introduce this astral projection pendant loaned by the fairy Ariel. It allows Briar-Rose to leave her sleeping body, adopt a magical glamour to look like a filthy woodsman named Talia, and actively guide knights through the lethal thorn forest surrounding her kingdom. If the knights prove to be terrible people, she leads them in circles or abandons them to the monsters. If they are decent, she helps them. It is a clever, functional patch. It gives her administrative access to her own rescue, allowing her to vet her suitors rather than just waking up married to a stranger. I respect the architecture of that decision immensely. It turns a passive victim into an active participant.

I just wish the actual implementation of it was not such an exhausting faff.

The book splits its time across two different eras. We get Briar preparing for the curse in the past, and Prince Leo attempting to navigate the cursed forest a century later. The past sections are easily the strongest part of the novel because they are rooted in practical preparation. Briar figures out that learning formal swordplay from royal guards is useless against a dark fairy. She needs to know how to fight dirty. She tracks down a group of local bandits and essentially pays them with royal jewels to beat her up until she learns how to survive. There is Anton, the gruff leader who makes her hold a heavy broadsword until her arms shake and forces her to chop wood when she fails. There is Benedict, an ex-assassin who teaches her how to identify poisons like Celamin by taste alone. There is Rogan the dwarf, Lorenzo the disgraced noble, and a young boy named Ezio. It is methodical, sensible preparation. She knows a catastrophic system failure is scheduled for her seventeenth birthday, and she is building a contingency plan. She even orchestrates a heist to steal a magical dagger called the Curse-Sharer from Lorenzo's father, hoping she can stab the fairy and drag her into the hundred-year sleep too. This is satisfying to read because it relies on concrete effort. She is not waiting for a miracle. She is doing the boring bit.

Then the curse actually hits, the timelines merge, and the pacing dies completely.

Leo’s timeline begins with a noble enough premise. He is the second prince of Germaine, and he volunteers to enter the forest because his older brother Wilheim is in love with a historian named Ingrid, and Leo does not want to ruin his sibling's life. He is not particularly strong or exceptionally brave, but he is decent. He abandons his escort of knights at a tavern because he refuses to lead other men to their deaths. He rings a bell at the forest edge, summons Talia, and they begin walking. And walking. And walking. The next hundred and fifty pages read like someone testing every single hazard in a simulated environment sequentially. They walk until they encounter a giant spider in a webbed pass. Leo panics, Talia distracts it, Leo stabs it. They rest and talk by a fire. They walk until they cross a log over a river. Leo falls in, nearly drowns, and Talia yells at him. They rest and talk by a fire. They walk until ogres capture Leo and attempt to boil him. He distracts them by suggesting they season their cooking pot with his supply of salt, and the good fairies arrive to rescue him. They rest and talk by a fire.

The camping scenes take up at least half the page count, and they are a proper chore to get through.

The presence of the good fairies—Margaret, Ariel, and Ophelia—only adds to this sense of arbitrary rule-making. They operate exactly like a team of senior engineers who deploy a flawed system and then refuse to write the documentation for it. They are the ones who originally gifted Briar with intelligence and wit at her christening. Margaret even tutored Briar to resist hypnotic fairy magic, which is a genuinely smart addition to the lore. But their interventions in Leo's timeline are baffling. When Leo is about to be boiled alive by ogres, the three fairies materialize out of nowhere, rescue him, and heal his massive head wound. Yet when he asks them to simply transport him the rest of the way to the castle, they refuse, claiming the distance would melt a mortal mind. They then vanish again, leaving him to walk for another week. They pop back in at the climax just to throw statues off a roof. Their magic is treated as a convenient contingency rather than a coherent system, stepping in only when the author has written Leo into an inescapable corner.

I do not mind a slow narrative, but the repetition becomes aggravating because the rules governing Talia's ghost form constantly fluctuate to serve the immediate needs of the plot. Early on, she establishes a strict rule that Leo is not allowed to touch her. We eventually learn this is because she is non-corporeal. Her hand would pass right through him, revealing her secret. She cannot eat, she cannot sleep, and she cannot manipulate physical objects without the help of local brownies or nymphs. This is a solid, understandable constraint. But later, when Leo is bitten by a venomous snake spawned from a basilisk, Talia suddenly manages to apply a tourniquet, suck the venom from his wound, and feed him a restorative potion. The book tries to hand-wave this by suggesting her astral body is somehow materializing out of sheer desperate emotion, or that the curse is weakening as dawn approaches, but it reads like a glaring error. You cannot establish a hard physical limitation for two hundred pages and then bypass it simply because the characters are feeling very stressed. It is exactly like setting a database field to read-only but then letting the user overwrite it anyway because they asked nicely. It is a massive footgun disguised as romantic desperation.

There are fleeting moments where Macdonald captures the eerie logistical reality of a cursed kingdom, and I wish the book had focused more on these details. During a severe storm, Leo and Talia take shelter in a house on the outskirts of the kingdom. The occupants inside are entirely frozen in time. A cook is suspended mid-motion while baking a pie, the ingredients still fresh after a century. A dog sits perfectly still by a cold hearth. The family slumbers in their chairs. It is a haunting image of a society paused mid-keystroke, perfectly preserved but completely inaccessible. It is in these quiet, domestic moments that the actual weight of the fairy's curse lands. The tragedy is not just that a princess is asleep; it is that thousands of ordinary lives were indefinitely suspended due to a royal dispute they had no part in.

The romance itself is the primary focus of the book, and your tolerance for it will dictate whether you finish the novel. Because they spend so much time sitting by campfires, Leo and Talia actually get to know one another. Macdonald does a good job of showing why they fit. Leo uses self-deprecating humour to cover his insecurities about being the mediocre second son. Talia uses abrasive sarcasm to cover the trauma of watching all her bandit friends age and die while she remained a frozen, ageless ghost. They balance each other out. There are some genuinely effective moments of emotional weight. When Leo is trapped in the Fear Marshes, a local hazard that conjures illusions, he sees his dead brother and his slaughtered knights. Talia's presence grounds him, even when the marsh tries to convince him she is merely a phantom. But this connection is stretched over far too many redundant conversations. The dialogue cycles loop endlessly. Leo asks Talia about her past. Talia gets defensive and looks away. Leo apologizes. Talia says it is fine. They stare at each other longingly. It happens so often I started predicting the exact paragraph where someone would sigh and refuse to elaborate. The romantic tension is supposed to carry the narrative, but instead it just bogs it down in repetitive emotional bikeshedding.

I nearly put the book down during their third straight day of eating roasted mushrooms and refusing to communicate.

The emotional core of Talia's isolation is genuinely grim, which makes the pacing issues even more frustrating. After she is cursed, we get fragmented chapters showing her century in the woods. The bandits refuse to abandon her. She has to watch Ezio, a young boy who worshipped her, grow up, confess his love, get rejected, and leave. She watches Rogan die of a red-crowned snakebite she cannot physically touch to treat. She watches Benedict slowly succumb to illness, brewing his own end-of-life potion. She watches Anton simply give up and pass away between the graves of his friends, clutching the first jewel she ever gave him. Macdonald captures the absolute horror of immortality brilliantly here. Talia is a static data point in a world that keeps moving, accumulating grief without any mechanism to process it. She cannot even cry properly, because her astral form does not produce tears. This tragedy grounds her abrasive personality. It makes perfect sense that she would be hostile and guarded by the time Leo shows up. The psychological weight of outliving everyone you care about is handled with surprising brutality.

Which makes the aggressively neat resolution of the climax feel entirely unearned.

The final confrontation is actually a very satisfying piece of mechanical plotting. Leo reaches the castle courtyard, but the wicked fairy Thirteen has learned to astral project as well. She intends to kill Leo and leave Briar trapped forever. In a clever reversal, Talia surrenders her astral form, forcing her consciousness back into her sleeping body in the tower so Thirteen will spare Leo. This leaves Leo alone in the courtyard to fight Thirteen's vulnerable astral projection while dodging a resurrected basilisk. He manages to grab the Curse-Sharer dagger still embedded in Thirteen's sleeping physical body and plunge it into her astral form, breaking the enchantment. It is a sensible distribution of labour. Leo handles the physical threat, while Talia navigates the magical sacrifice. The good fairies assist by tossing debris at monsters from the rooftops. He runs up to the tower, kisses her, and the kingdom wakes up.

The aftermath is where the book loses its nerve. After a century of unbearable isolation and grief, the reunion sequence is handled in about ten pages. The castle wakes up. Briar is reunited with her parents, who seem entirely unfazed by the lost time. Leo's brother Wilheim immediately arrives at the gates, having followed him through the forest with a party of knights. And the old man who gave Leo advice at the tavern in chapter one turns out to be Ezio, the bandit boy. We learn that Ezio used a wishing well to ask to see Talia happy again. Because the well twists wishes, it kept him alive for a century, forcing him to watch his own wife and children grow old and die just so he could survive long enough to see Talia smile on her wedding day. That is a horrifying, devastating twist. It should be a moment of profound, crushing weight. Instead, everyone simply laughs about how old he looks, and they move on to the wedding arrangements. It is incredibly convenient. The sheer weight of what Talia and Ezio have endured is swept aside so quickly it feels like someone is taking the piss. The trauma of watching her entire found family rot in the woods is patched over with a quick conversation and a nice dress. The book spends two hundred pages making sure we understand how miserable camping in a cursed forest is, but it cannot spare more than a chapter to unpack the psychological damage of a hundred-year suspended animation. It wraps up so cleanly you would think the previous century of suffering was just a minor administrative delay.

Recommending this book depends entirely on which parameter matters most to you as a reader. If you want a fast-paced fantasy adventure, you will be bored out of your skull by the sheer volume of woodland hiking. The middle of the book is a logistical void where momentum goes to die in production. If you require a flawlessly logical magical system, the convenient physical inconsistencies of Talia's astral projection will drive you absolutely mad. The rules bend whenever the romance requires physical contact, completely undermining the established constraints of the world. But if you specifically want to see an author disassemble the passive narrative of Sleeping Beauty and rebuild it so the princess actually gets to test and approve her own rescuer, this book accomplishes exactly that. It is a functional repair to a deeply broken legacy story. It gives the damsel the administrative rights to her own fate, forcing her to learn practical survival skills and take responsibility for her own defence. You just have to be prepared to sit by a lot of campfires and wade through a substantial amount of mud to see the system finally work.

I have a soft spot for fairy tales. The good ones are not gentle. They begin with a bargain and they do not forget the bargain. So the opening of this book made me sit up. A fairy appears, a human asks for something, and the fairy says, 'You may keep your child.' That is the exact note I need. It is generous and ominous at once. Keep the child, fairy says, but the sentence is not over. The debt remains.

The early pages honor that note. There is a forest. There is a warning: 'But do not drop a coin, no matter how tempting.' There is a fencer who says, 'I could teach you how to fence, if you like?' There are fairies that glow. There is a sentence I underlined: 'A table was laid out for a dinner that had never happened, not a single chip in a bowl.' That is the kind of detail that makes me forgive a lot. It shows absence. It does not announce grief. I wanted this book to be made of that sentence.

It was not. The book has a habit I noticed around the second or third weird event. It introduces magic, then it takes it back. 'Not real, not real, but... but it felt real.' That is a character trying to explain a wound. 'But actually, you being there made me realise it was just that, an illusion.' That is another character deleting a moment before it can matter. 'But this is only a dream.' That is a third. After a while, every miracle arrives with a receipt. The feeling is not wonder. It is buyer's remorse.

I want to be fair. Some of the backtracking is intentional. Fairy tales are full of illusions, and a character who cannot tell dream from waking is a useful character. But the book relies on the ambiguity so often that it stops being ambiguity. It becomes a tic. A tic can be charming once. It is not charming when the villain's threat, the hero's feelings, the forest's danger and the central relationship all get the same 'but wait' treatment. The entire building trembled and I did not care. Why would I? I had been told, over and over, that trembling buildings are often only dreams.

There is also the matter of rules. The opening warning about the coin is the kind of rule a fairy tale should test. I kept waiting for the temptation, for the moment when someone would have to decide whether to let the coin fall. That moment never arrived. Plans are made and then put aside because 'the fairy would not be fooled, that the location would not matter.' If the fairy would not be fooled, I need to see the fairy think. Instead the fairy says 'I may not answer.' The villain, if there is one, is less a character than a weather report. Darkness comes, darkness goes, someone is unsteady, and the story moves on.

Names are currency in fairy tales, and this book does not spend it. Someone asks, 'What were his parents' names?' Someone else asks, 'What are my brothers' names?' These are questions that should cut. They are answered with soft deflections: 'These... these aren't reasons to love someone.' The moment is not allowed to bite. Names slipped away from him, the book says at another point, and I felt the sentence was true of the book. It keeps letting names and questions slip away.

Briar offers a fencing lesson, and it is a promise that goes nowhere. 'You... you would teach me how to fence?' is a moment of hope. 'But you must promise me you'll put up a good fight!' is a moment of energy. Neither moment changes what follows. A sword is a promise. If you put it into a fairy tale, you should either use it or explain why the promise was broken. The book does not do either.

The monsters are mood rather than menace. 'They were slow, but they did not stumble.' That is a good image and I wanted more of it. Instead the book gives me a general sense of dark things and then reminds me that someone 'is not a very angry person.' I do not need every story to be cruel. I need a story to take its own darkness seriously. This one keeps turning the lights off and then apologizing for the dark.

The narrator, such as it is, also keeps telling me what to think about feelings. There is a line: 'The years may have scarred me, but they shaped me too. I may not be as patient or kind as I once was, but I was still me.' That is a thesis statement. It is not a scene. I do not need a thesis statement in a fairy tale. I need to watch the scarred years happen. The same happens with 'I am jealous that all these dark things may be unknown to her.' That is a moment of genuine darkness. I wanted it to stay dark. Instead it is followed by reassurance, by someone who 'is not a very angry person.' The book keeps softening its own edges.

Leo, the protagonist, is the other reason the book loses ground. He begins in the wrong place and wants to leave. He pushes his glasses up his nose and says 'I'd prefer not to go, if it's all the same to you.' That is not a hero's refusal. It is a customer who wants to return an item. He dares not ask, even though he knows his curiosity will only increase. He worries about sleep. When he takes a position, it is 'nearly dying is not actually dying.' The book intends that as a stubborn kind of courage. It reads instead as the same almost-but-not-quite logic that runs through every chapter.

The characters around Leo do not get much more substance. Briar appears, offers fencing, and then mostly waits. Ingrid is strong, 'but only just.' The fairy makes rules, then bends them. Talia has more inner life than the rest, and there are moments when she feels like a person. But even Talia gets lines like 'sleep you must,' which is a costume rather than a voice. They are actors on a set. The set is a forest. The forest is described as wild, overgrown, a different kind of prison, but I never felt its geography. It is a string of moments with moss on them.

Consider the central relationship. There is a connection between Leo and Talia, or perhaps between Leo and the fairies, or perhaps between Leo and the idea of someone. I never found which one the book meant. They sit together in perfect silence. That is lovely. But then they speak in aphorisms: 'I know exactly how you feel. They may not be your match, but they might be someone's. But not certainly.' This is fortune-cookie talk, and it does not tell me why these two people matter to each other. The book is more interested in the idea of love than in the work of two people becoming close. The one concrete thing I learned is that 'these are not reasons to love someone.' Fair enough. But the book never gives me the reasons, either.

I also want to note the pacing. A quest can be slow. Slow is not the same as stagnant. The text gives the characters a marching order: 'Keep moving, keep moving, don't look up.' I wanted to obey it. The story did not. It stopped to roast mushrooms. It stopped to talk. It stopped to make sure everyone felt safe. Some of those stops are good, but together they drain the momentum. By the time the group was 'stumbling around in the dark for what must have been hours,' I knew how the paragraph would end. They would find a way out. They always find a way out.

The prose is not bad. I keep having to say that, because there are good sentences in this book. 'A table was laid out for a dinner that had never happened, not a single chip in a bowl.' That one is worth the price of admission. 'Her entire face looked just the same to him. Problematically so, actually.' That is funny and sad and specific. 'They did not exist anymore, or if they did, they had moved so far away she could not claw back the pieces of her heart they had taken with them.' That is too long, but it has a real feeling in it. The book can write. It cannot decide to commit. It is a collection of good sentences waiting for a plot that will not look them in the eye.

And then there are the sentences that are not good. 'The years may have scarred me, but they shaped me too.' 'I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not a very angry person.' 'If all we have in our long lives is a few weeks in a forest... it'll be these days I return to in my dreams.' These are the kind of lines that sound profound in a notebook and sound hollow on a page. They are not earned. They are conclusions. The book tells me what its themes are. A good fairy tale does not tell me its themes. It lets me trip over them in the dark.

Maybe this is a book aimed at readers who want a soft version of fairy tales. There is nothing wrong with a soft book. But this one is not soft in the way a lullaby is soft. It is soft in the way a sponge is soft. It absorbs every sharp edge. When a character says 'I think they got what they deserved, but...' the pause is the whole book. It wants to condemn and forgive at the same time. It wants danger without fear, grief without pain, love without risk. That is not a fairy tale. That is a product with the bumps filed off.

The ending, at least the last story moment, is better than the rest. 'They wrote to each other often, but they only saw each other once again, at the christening of her first child.' That is the kind of ending a good fairy tale earns. It is sad, and it does not explain itself. I believed it. For a page, the book stopped hedging. But one good ending cannot make me forget a hundred pages of 'it was only a dream.' The book expects me to feel something because it has finally stopped walking backwards. I felt only regret that it did not stop sooner.

I finished the book. I finished because it is short and because I kept hoping the version I saw in the opening would come back. It never did. By the last page I was not angry. I was tired. I have been given better fairy tales by my own imagination at the end of a long shift. At least when I imagine a story, I do not have to watch it apologize for itself.

Would I recommend it? No. Not to the reader who likes clear rules and real teeth in a fairy tale. Not to the reader who wants a dangerous forest and then gets a forest with mushrooms and moss. Not to the reader who wants a central relationship that earns its silence. And not to the reader who wants the book to trust its own magic. That last reader is the one I am thinking about. I am that reader. If you are that reader too, this book will make you read a good sentence, feel a flicker, and then watch the flicker get called an illusion. The fairy tale is in there. It just never stays awake long enough.

Most bookshops put a Sleeping Beauty retelling like this next to the other updated fairy tales in which the girl learns a sword and the boy learns not to call her a prize. That is the right neighborhood. It is also why I opened it with a teacher's suspicion. I already know that argument. I wanted to see whether Katherine Macdonald had given the princess actual work, or only a better costume.

I finished the whole thing. I am going to talk about the guide's identity, the deaths in the woods, and the kiss that ends the curse. If you still want those closed, stop here.

The idea that interested me is not romance. It is contingency. Briar-Rose, at ten, hears a courtier mutter about seven years left and forces her parents to tell the truth. Then she treats the curse like a problem that still has to be sat for. She trains with a blade. Mental resistance with the fairy Margaret, who slips into her mind and makes her dance until she can block it. Later she sneaks out in a maid's clothes, hires bandits, learns poisons from an ex-assassin, pays for a stolen curse-sharing dagger, and accepts a fairy pendant that lets her project out of her sleeping body. That is a lesson plan. I respected it because somebody is doing the extra hours. The original tale leaves the girl on a bed. This one makes her run a forest operation for a century under a borrowed name.

The borrowed name is Talia, after her maid. I am saying that plainly because the book withholds it for a long stretch and then explains it in a chapter that also contains what is left of her found family. The dual timeline is the mechanism: Leo walks into the thorns in the present, while Briar's youth is cut in between. For a while that structure is useful. You see why the guide knows every shortcut, why she will not be touched, and why she is furious when he risks himself. Then the forest starts assigning the same homework.

Leo is the second prince of Germaine. He goes so his older brother can marry Ingrid, dismisses his knights so they will not die, and rings a bell for a guide. He is decent. He says a living person is not a prize, more than once, and he means it. He also slips off a log into rapids, freezes in front of a spider the size of a horse, nearly goes into an ogre's pot, nearly drowns with sirens, and later gets fed a perfect false life by a djinn. After each crisis they sit by a fire. He learns that she is lonely. She learns that he is kinder than the men who joked about assaulting a sleeping princess. I understand the intention. The tests are supposed to prove a noble heart. In the actual timetable, it is the same scene with different monsters.

I got impatient around the Fear Marshes, and again after the dream-demon. Not because danger is illegitimate. Because the book had already shown me who these two were, and it kept proving it. Talia's rule about not touching her is practical, then tragic, then romantic. Leo keeps risking himself after she tells him not to. She keeps snapping that he is the last hope. That is a loop, not a development. If I were marking this, I would write in the margin: show me where the third near-death teaches us something the spider did not.

What does work, for a particular reader, is the labor behind the glamour. Talia cannot eat, cannot sleep, cannot lift a body. She watches Rogan die of a snakebite she cannot treat. She watches Benedict take a last potion. She stays beside Anton until he stops breathing, and later cannot bury the skeleton herself. Ezio, the boy she thought of as a brother, tries to kiss her awake without permission, fails, and leaves after a wish at the well. Lorenzo goes after a knight who did not want the princess. That is the cost of agency in this version. You get a say, and then you do a hundred years of unpaid guiding while your friends age out of the story. I believed that more than I believed a lot of the prettier nights in between.

One practical thing: the book is very clear about consent, and that is not nothing. Ezio loves her and the kiss does nothing, because she did not choose him. The curse is written as a noble heart, but the plot treats choice as the real mechanism. Leo is allowed to be afraid of spiders. He is allowed to cry in the thorns. He is not turned into a joke for either.

The letters she writes on the last night, in case waking erases Talia, are the most honest pages. She is afraid of unravelling. She tells her future self not to be cruel to Leo. She lists the bandits so they will not become scenery. I recognized the fear of losing the person you were while you were surviving. I also noticed that the book then comforts you. She wakes. She remembers. She says she loves him too. The risk is named and then removed. Fine, but that is a choice, and it is a soft one.

The ending is the expected one, only louder. Leo pulls the curse-sharing dagger from the sleeping fairy and drives it into her heart. He kisses the body in the tower. The kingdom sits up. His brother arrives with old Ezio as a slow guide. The epilogue hands them a long marriage, children named after the dead, a restored den, and a grandson who runs off to the fairies. If you need the original tale's hush, this will feel like a ceremony with too many speeches. If you need to see every spare character accounted for, it will feel responsible.

So. Who is this for. Not for someone who wants Perrault's economy, or who will notice that "do not touch me" and "you are not a prize" are repeated until they lose their edge. Not for a reader who is tired of quests that measure worth by how many times the boy almost dies. It is for the reader who likes a princess with a syllabus, a prince who is allowed to be afraid, and a forest that still contains songs, helpful brownies, and a wishing well you are told not to use. It is for the reader who wants the girl to have backup plans and who will forgive the book for walking through every one of them.

I would hand it to that reader. I would not hand it to a colleague who wanted a tight adult novel, or to anyone who already groaned at the last three retellings on the same shelf. The book does the extra work of giving Briar a plan. Then it makes you walk the plan, step by step, until the steps themselves become the point. That is either comfort or delay, depending on how much patience you have left for another clearing, another confession, and another promise that they are almost there.