In my review of Better Living Through Algorithms I was briefly in awe of the amount of award nominated fiction Naomi Kritzer had written, and somewhat embarrassed that I had reviewed very little of it on this blog.

The same can be said for T. Kingfisher (or Ursula Vernon) only times eleven. Vernon has been on my radar since Jackalope Wives back in 2015, and despite looking forward to reading A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (Lode Star award winner) back in 2021 in my Hugo’s Reaction Post, and pronouncing my intent to read Nettle and Bone in my End of 2023 Booktag, JW remained the only thing I had read by the author when Thornhedge arrived in my Libby queue.

To date, this author has won five Hugo’s and been nominated for another three. It seems I’m a bit out of touch.

In any case, Thornhedge did arrive and I listened to the entire thing (4 hours) in one sitting while driving to the beach.

Kingfisher (and narrator Jennifer Blom) definitely have the ‘fairy-tale voice’ down, and the story of the enchantress Toadling and the gentle knight Halim is quite compelling just in the way that it is told.

Notice I’ve not mentioned the classic princess trapped in a tower. There is one, but as the back-cover (amazon page) blurb boldly states: “This isn’t her story.”

As such, Thornhedge positions itself as the type of fairy tale retelling which takes a story you know (in this case Sleeping Beauty), and recontextualizes it by changing the point of view or focusing on little known elements of the original tale. I would say it shares a lineage with books like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (which I have not read), or Song of Achilles and Galatea by Madeline Miller (as the counterpart to this trend which deals with Greek mythology). Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, and Spinning Silver also come to mind as good comparisons.

But there are hundreds of similar retellings, if not thousands, and I’ll admit that on a first listen, I was unsure what about this one made it stand out from the others as something worthy of a Hugo.

My favorite parts were probably the sections which took place in a kind of faerie realm among swamp monsters called the Greenteeth (which I assume are somehow inspired by Jenny Greenteeth), but I can’t say these these affable horrors were SO affable as to dredge up an award nomination from their murky depths.

And so, I started asking myself questions. Primarily: What surprised me about this story?

This is perhaps where Halim comes into the foreground. I’ve not read of many European fairytales including Muslims, and cannot think of a single Muslim knight in any of the fairy tales I know (sorry if this was a slight spoiler). I’m certainly not a scholar in this area, but I am probably representative of the average person’s knowledge about fairy tales so I’m assuming if there are Muslim knights wandering around European fairy tales, they’re relatively obscure.

So this might be one element which caught people’s attention while reading. Also, as Dina over at SFF Book Reviews mentions in their post Let Sleeping Beauties Lie: T. Kingfisher – Thornhedge, neither Toadling nor Halim are conventionally beautiful characters. I think this is perhaps another area in which Thornhedge subverts expectations and goes its own way.

Should Thornhedge Have Won the Hugo for Best Novella?

Unfortunately, my experience with the nominees in the 2024 Best Novella category are a bit thin. Before reading Thornhedge, I’d only read and reviewed The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, which I thought somewhat underwhelming despite important thematic elements. I think I can firmly say I enjoyed Thornhedge more, but would not say either were particularly obvious choices for the win.

That is all I have for this time. What are y’all’s thoughts? Was the award deserved? Is there another story you would have liked to see take the rocket? Have you read Thornhedge yet? What were your favorite parts? Please leave your thoughts in the comments. I’m looking forward to talking about this one!