(In the interests of full disclosure, the author is a friend of mine. Nevertheless, this review represents my honest and considered opinion.)
Thornspell is a fantasy loosely based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. The action all takes place long after the princess has been cast into her long sleep, and follows the prince destined to wake her, Prince Sigismund. The action takes place in a world in which the mortal realm and the realm of the faie overlap in certain places. Sigismund is joined at various stages of the story by friends, some human, some clearly of the faie, and some you can't decide which they are. One of the great delights of the book is trying to figure out these various hangers-on: which are working in Sigismund's interest? Which are working to thwart him? What are their true agendas? What are their true natures? Despite pondering on these issues throughout, two of the final revelations took me completely by surprise.
Although the story is clearly intended to take place somewhere and somewhen in medieval Western Europe, Lowe has chosen to keep the exact location unclear by making everything anonymous. Thus the action takes place in The Kingdom which has Northern Provinces and Southern Provinces, a West Castle and a Southern Palace and so forth. The capital city is even - and only - referred to as the capital city. While I don't doubt that this was a deliberate and considered decision on the part of the author, I personally found it off-putting. It made it seem like I was reading an early draft, where the place-holder names were intended to be replaced by something more meaningful in a later draft. I would have found the story much more easy to engage with had these places all had proper names, be they real or imagined.
Prince Sigismund spends much of his time living a cloistered, comfortable life - him being a prince and all. At one stage late in the book he is finally forced out of his comfortable existence, and has to make a long journey alone, friendless, incognito, and in wintry weather. This could have been a pivotal event in the life of the young prince, and could have been an exciting sequence in its own right, but unfortunately Lowe chose to get the journey over with in a couple of pages, mostly in summarized flashback. This seemed like a lost opportunity to me.
But these are very minor quibbles. It is an excellent and fun book and I enjoyed it hugely. Even though it is nominally pitched at the Young Adult market, it works well as a good read for grown-ups.
Thornspell is by Helen Lowe.
