Review: The Book That Broke the World, by Mark Lawrence

The Book That Broke the World is high fantasy and a direct sequel to The Book That Wouldn't Burn. You should not start here. In a delightful break from normal practice, the author provides a useful summary of the previous volume at the start of this book to jog your memory.

At the end of The Book That Wouldn't Burn, the characters were scattered and in various states of corporeality after some major revelations about the nature of the Library and the first appearance of the insectile Skeer. The Book That Wouldn't Burn picks up where it left off, and there is a lot more contact with the Skeer, but my guess that they would be the next viewpoint characters does not pan out. Instead, we get a new group and a new protagonist: Celcha, whose sees angels who come to visit her brother.

I have complaints, but before I launch into those, I should say that I liked this book apart from the totally unnecessary cannibalism. (I'll get to that.) Livira is a bit sidelined, which is regrettable, but Celcha and her brother are interesting new characters, and both Arpix and Clovis, supporting characters in the first book, get some excellent character development. Similar to the first book, this is a puzzle box story full of world-building tidbits with intellectually-satisfying interactions. Lawrence elaborates and complicates his setting in ways that don't contradict earlier parts of the story but create more room and depth for the characters to be creative. I came away still invested in this world and eager to find out how Lawrence pulls the world-building and narrative threads together.

The biggest drawback of this book is that it's not new. My thought after finishing the first book of the series was that if Lawrence had enough world-building ideas to fill three books to that same level of density, this had the potential of being one of my favorite fantasy series of all time. By the end of the second book, I concluded that this is not the case. Instead of showing us new twists and complications the way the first book did throughout, The Book That Broke the World mostly covers the same thematic ground from some new angles. It felt like Lawrence was worried the reader of the first book may not have understood the theme or the world-building, so he spent most of the second book nailing down anything that moved.

I found that frustrating. One of the best parts of The Book That Wouldn't Burn was that Lawrence trusted the reader to keep up, which for me hit the glorious but rare sweet spot of pacing where I was figuring out the world at roughly the same pace as the characters. It surprised me in some very enjoyable ways. The Book That Broke the World did not surprise me. There are a few new things, which I enjoyed, and a few elaborations and developments of ideas, which I mostly enjoyed, but I saw the big plot twist coming at least fifty pages before it happened and found the aftermath more annoying than revelatory. It doesn't help that the plot rests on character misunderstandings, one of my least favorite tropes.

One of the other disappointments of this book is that the characters stop using the Library as a library. The Library at the center of this series is a truly marvelous piece of world-building with numerous fascinating features that are unrelated to its contents, but Livira used it first and foremost as a repository of books. The first book was full of characters solving problems by finding a relevant book and reading it.

In The Book That Broke the World, sadly, this is mostly gone. The Library is mostly reduced to a complicated Big Dumb Object setting. It's still a delightful bit of world-building, and we learn about a few new features, but I only remember two places where the actual books are important to the story. Even the book referenced in the title is mostly important as an artifact with properties unrelated to the words that it contains or to the act of reading it. I think this is a huge lost opportunity and something I hope Lawrence fixes in the last book of the trilogy.

This book instead focuses on the politics around the existence of the Library itself. Here I'm cautiously optimistic, although a lot is going to depend on the third book. Lawrence has set up a three-sided argument between groups that I will uncharitably describe as the libertarian techbros, the "burn it all down" reactionaries, and the neoliberal centrist technocrats. All three of those positions suck, and Lawrence had better be setting the stage for Livira to find a different path. Her unwillingness to commit to any of those sides gives me hope, but bringing this plot to a satisfying conclusion is going to be tricky. I hope I like what Lawrence comes up with, but it feels far from certain.

It doesn't help that he's started delivering some points with a sledgehammer, and that's where we get to the unnecessary cannibalism. Thankfully this is a fairly small part of the tail end of the book, but it was an unpleasant surprise that I did not want in this novel and that I don't think made the story any better.

It's tempting to call the cannibalism gratuitous, but it does fit one of the main themes of this story, namely that humans are depressingly good at using any rule-based object in unexpected and nasty ways that are contrary to the best intentions of the designer. This is the fundamental challenge of the Library as a whole and the question that I suspect the third book will be devoted to addressing, so I understand why Lawrence wanted to emphasize his point. The reason why there is cannibalism here is directly related to a profound misunderstanding of the properties of the library, and I detected an echo of one of C.S. Lewis's arguments in The Last Battle about the nature of Hell.

The problem, though, is that this is Satanic baby-killerism, to borrow a term from Fred Clark. There are numerous ways to show this type of perversion of well-intended systems, which I know because Lawrence used other ones in the first book that were more subtle but equally effective. One of the best parts of The Book That Wouldn't Burn is that there were few real villains. The conflict was structural, all sides had valid perspectives, and the ethical points of that story were made with some care and nuance.

The problem with cannibalism as it's used here is not merely that it's gross and disgusting and off-putting to the reader, although it is all of those things. If I wanted to read horror, I would read horror novels. I don't appreciate surprise horror used for shock value in regular fantasy. But worse, it's an abandonment of moral nuance. The function of cannibalism in this story is like the function of Satanic baby-killers: it's to signal that these people are wholly and irredeemably evil. They are the Villains, they are Wrong, and they cease to be characters and become symbols of what the protagonists are fighting. This is destructive to the story because it's designed to provoke a visceral short-circuit in the reader and let the author get away with sloppy story-telling. If the author needs to use tactics like this to point out who is the villain, they have failed to set up their moral quandary properly.

The worst part is that this was entirely unnecessary because Lawrence's story-telling wasn't sloppy and he set up his moral quandary just fine. No one was confused about the ethical point here. I as the reader was following without difficulty, and had appreciated the subtlety with which Lawrence posed the question. But apparently he thought he was too subtle and decided to come back to the point with a pile-driver. I think that seriously injured the story. The ethical argument here is much more engaging and thought-provoking when it's more finely balanced.

That's a lot of complaints, mostly because this is a good book that I badly wanted to be a great book but which kept tripping over its own feet. A lot of trilogies have weak second books. Hopefully this is another example of the mid-story sag, and the finale will be worthy of the start of the story. But I have to admit the moral short-circuiting and the de-emphasis of the actual books in the library has me a bit nervous. I want a lot out of the third book, and I hope I'm not asking this author for too much.

If you liked the first book, I think you'll like this one too, with the caveat that it's quite a bit darker and more violent in places, even apart from the surprise cannibalism. But if you've not started this series, you may want to wait for the third book to see if Lawrence can pull off the ending.

Followed by The Book That Held Her Heart, currently scheduled for publication in April of 2025.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: The Wings Upon Her Back, by Samantha Mills

The Wings Upon Her Back is a political steampunk science fantasy novel. If the author's name sounds familiar, it may be because Samantha Mills's short story "Rabbit Test" won Nebula, Locus, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards. This is her first novel.

Winged Zemolai is a soldier of the mecha god and the protege of Mecha Vodaya, the Voice. She has served the city-state of Radezhda by defending it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, for twenty-six years. Despite that, it takes only a moment of errant mercy for her entire life to come crashing down. On a whim, she spares a kitchen worker who was concealing a statue of the scholar god, meaning that he was only pretending to worship the worker god like all workers should. Vodaya is unforgiving and uncompromising, as is the sleeping mecha god. Zemolai's wings are ripped from her back and crushed in the hand of the god, and she's left on the ground to die of mechalin withdrawal.

The Wings Upon Her Back is told in two alternating timelines. The main one follows Zemolai after her exile as she is rescued by a young group of revolutionaries who think she may be useful in their plans. The other thread starts with Zemolai's childhood and shows the reader how she became Winged Zemolai: her scholar family, her obsession with flying, her true devotion to the mecha god, and the critical early years when she became Vodaya's protege. Mills maintains the separate timelines through the book and wraps them up in a rather neat piece of symbolic parallelism in the epilogue.

I picked up this book on a recommendation from C.L. Clark, and yes, indeed, I can see why she liked this book. It's a story about a political awakening, in which Zemolai slowly realizes that she has been manipulated and lied to and that she may, in fact, be one of the baddies. The Wings Upon Her Back is more personal than some other books with that theme, since Zemolai was specifically (and abusively) groomed for her role by Vodaya. Much of the book is Zemolai trying to pull out the hooks that Vodaya put in her or, in the flashback timeline, the reader watching Vodaya install those hooks.

The flashback timeline is difficult reading. I don't think Mills could have left it out, but she says in the afterword that it was the hardest part of the book to write and it was also the hardest part of the book to read. It fills in some interesting bits of world-building and backstory, and Mills does a great job pacing the story revelations so that both threads contribute equally, but mostly it's a story of manipulative abuse. We know from the main storyline that Vodaya's tactics work, which gives those scenes the feel of a slow-motion train wreck. You know what's going to happen, you know it will be bad, and yet you can't look away.

It occurred to me while reading this that Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory told a similar type of story without the flashback structure, which eliminates the stifling feeling of inevitability. I don't think that would not have worked for this story. If you simply rearranged the chapters of The Wings Upon Her Back into a linear narrative, I would have bailed on the book. Watching Zemolai being manipulated would have been too depressing and awful for me to make it to the payoff without the forward-looking hope of the main timeline. It gave me new appreciation for the difficulty of what Tesh pulled off.

Mills uses this interwoven structure well, though. At about 90% through this book I had no idea how it could end in the space remaining, but it reaches a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Mills uses a type of ending that normally bothers me, but she does it by handling the psychological impact so well that I couldn't help but admire it. I'm avoiding specifics because I think it worked better when I wasn't expecting it, but it ties beautifully into the thematic point of the book.

I do have one structural objection, though. It's one of those problems I didn't notice while reading, but that started bothering me when I thought back through the story from a political lens. The Wings Upon Her Back is Zemolai's story, her redemption arc, and that means she drives the plot. The band of revolutionaries are great characters (particularly Galiana), but they're supporting characters. Zemolai is older, more experienced, and knows critical information they don't have, and she uses it to effectively take over. As setup for her character arc, I see why Mills did this. As political praxis, I have issues.

There is a tendency in politics to believe that political skill is portable and repurposable. Converting opposing operatives to the cause is welcomed not only because they indicate added support, but also because they can use their political skill to help you win instead. To an extent this is not wrong, and is probably the most true of combat skills (which Zemolai has in abundance). But there's an underlying assumption that politics is symmetric, and a critical reason why I hold many of the political positions that I do hold is that I don't think politics is symmetric.

If someone has been successfully stoking resentment and xenophobia in support of authoritarians, converts to an anti-authoritarian cause, and then produces propaganda stoking resentment and xenophobia against authoritarians, this is in some sense an improvement. But if one believes that resentment and xenophobia are inherently wrong, if one's politics are aimed at reducing the resentment and xenophobia in the world, then in a way this person has not truly converted. Worse, because this is an effective manipulation tactic, there is a strong tendency to put this type of political convert into a leadership position, where they will, intentionally or not, start turning the anti-authoritarian movement into a copy of the authoritarian movement they left. They haven't actually changed their politics because they haven't understood (or simply don't believe in) the fundamental asymmetry in the positions. It's the same criticism that I have of realpolitik: the ends do not justify the means because the means corrupt the ends.

Nothing that happens in this book is as egregious as my example, but the more I thought about the plot structure, the more it bothered me that Zemolai never listens to the revolutionaries she joins long enough to wrestle with why she became an agent of an authoritarian state and they didn't. They got something fundamentally right that she got wrong, and perhaps that should have been reflected in who got to make future decisions. Zemolai made very poor choices and yet continues to be the sole main character of the story, the one whose decisions and actions truly matter. Maybe being wrong about everything should be disqualifying for being the main character, at least for a while, even if you think you've understood why you were wrong.

That problem aside, I enjoyed this. Both timelines were compelling and quite difficult to put down, even when they got rather dark. I could have done with less body horror and a few fewer fight scenes, but I'm glad I read it.

Science fiction readers should be warned that the world-building, despite having an intricate and fascinating surface, is mostly vibes. I started the book wondering how people with giant metal wings on their back can literally fly, and thought the mentions of neural ports, high-tech materials, and immune-suppressing drugs might mean that we'd get some sort of explanation. We do not: heavier-than-air flight works because it looks really cool and serves some thematic purposes. There are enough hints of technology indistinguishable from magic that you could make up your own explanations if you wanted to, but that's not something this book is interested in. There's not a thing wrong with that, but don't get caught by surprise if you were in the mood for a neat scientific explanation of apparent magic.

Recommended if you like somewhat-harrowing character development with a heavy political lens and steampunk vibes, although it's not the sort of book that I'd press into the hands of everyone I know. The Wings Upon Her Back is a complete story in a single novel.

Content warning: the main character is a victim of physical and emotional abuse, so some of that is a lot. Also surgical gore, some torture, and genocide.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Reasons Not to Worry, by Brigid Delaney

Reasons Not to Worry is a self-help non-fiction book about stoicism, focusing specifically on quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Brigid Delaney is a long-time Guardian columnist who has written on a huge variety of topics, including (somewhat relevantly to this book) her personal experiences trying weird fads.

Stoicism is having a moment among the sort of men who give people life advice in podcast form. Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive, has made a career out of being the face of stoicism in everyone's podcast feed (and, of course, hosting his own). He is far from alone. If you pay attention to anyone in the male self-help space right now (Cal Newport, in my case), you have probably heard something vague about the "wisdom of the stoics."

Given that the core of stoicism is easily interpreted as a strategy for overcoming your emotions with logic, this isn't surprising. Philosophies that lean heavily on college dorm room logic, discount emotion, and argue that society is full of obvious flaws that can be analyzed and debunked by one dude with some blog software and a free afternoon have been very popular in tech circles for the past ten to fifteen years, and have spread to some extent into popular culture. Intriguingly, though, stoicism is a system of virtue ethics, which means it is historically in opposition to consequentialist philosophies like utilitarianism, the ethical philosophy behind effective altruism and other related Silicon Valley fads.

I am pretty exhausted with the whole genre of men talking to each other about how to live a better life — Cal Newport by himself more than satisfies the amount of that I want to absorb — but I was still mildly curious about stoicism. My education didn't provide me with a satisfying grounding in major historical philosophical movements, so I occasionally look around for good introductions. Stoicism also has some reputation as an anxiety-reduction technique, and I could use more of those. When I saw a Discord recommendation for Reasons Not to Worry that specifically mentioned its lack of bro perspective, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Reasons Not to Worry is indeed not a bro book, although I would have preferred fewer appearances of the author's friend Andrew, whose opinions on stoicism I could not possibly care less about. What it is, though, is a shallow and credulous book that falls squarely in the middle of the lightweight self-help genre. Delaney is here to explain why stoicism is awesome and to convince you that a school of Greek and Roman philosophers knew exactly how you should think about your life today. If this sounds quasi-religious, well, I'll get to that.

Delaney does provide a solid introduction to stoicism that I think is a bit more approachable than reading the relevant Wikipedia article. In her presentation, the core of stoicism is the practice of four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The modern definition of "stoic" as someone who is impassive in the presence of pleasure or pain is somewhat misleading, but Delaney does emphasize a goal of ataraxia, or tranquility of mind. By making that the goal rather than joy or pleasure, stoicism tries to avoid the trap of the hedonic treadmill in favor of a more achievable persistent contentment.

As an aside, some quick Internet research makes me doubt Delaney's summary here. Other material about stoicism I found focuses on apatheia and associates ataraxia with Epicureanism instead. But I won't start quibbling with Delaney's definitions; I'm not qualified and this review is already too long.

The key to ataraxia, in Delaney's summary of stoicism, is to focus only on those parts of life we can control. She summarizes those as our character, how we treat others, and our actions and reactions. Everything else — wealth, the esteem of our colleagues, good health, good fortune — is at least partly outside of our control, and therefore we should enjoy it when we have it but try to be indifferent to whether it will last. Attempting to control things that are outside of our control is doomed to failure and will disturb our tranquility. Essentially all of this book is elaborations and variations on this theme, specialized to some specific area of life like social media, anxiety, or grief and written in the style of a breezy memoir.

If you're familiar with modern psychological treatment frameworks like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, this summary of stoicism may sound familiar. (Apparently this is not an accident; the predecessor to CBT used stoicism as a philosophical basis.) Stoicism, like those treatment approaches, tries to refocus your attention on the things that you can improve and de-emphasizes the things outside of your control. This is a lot of the appeal, at least to me (and I think to Delaney as well).

Hearing that definition, you may have some questions. Why those virtues specifically? They sound good, but all virtues sound good almost by definition. Is there any measure of your success in following those virtues outside your subjective feeling of ataraxia? Does the focus on only things you can control lead to ignoring problems only mostly outside of your control, where your actions would matter but only to a small degree? Doesn't this whole philosophy sound a little self-centered? What do non-stoic virtue ethics look like, and why do they differ from stoicism? What is the consequentialist critique of stoicism?

This is where the shortcomings of this book become clear: Delaney is not very interested in questions like this. There are sections on some of those topics, particularly the relationship between stoicism and social justice, but her treatment is highly unsatisfying. She raises the question, talks about her doubts about stoicism's applicability, and then says that, after further thought, she decided stoicism is entirely consistent with social justice and the stoics were right after all. There is a little bit more explanation than that, but not much. Stoicism can apparently never be wrong; it can only be incompletely understood.

Self-help books often fall short here, and I suspect this may be what the audience wants. Part of the appeal of the self-help genre is artificial certainty. Becoming a better manager, starting a business, becoming more productive, or working out an entire life philosophy are not problems amenable to a highly approachable and undemanding book. We all know that at some level, but the seductive allure of the self-help genre is the promise of simplifying complex problems down to a few approachable bullet points. Here is a life philosophy in a neatly packaged form, and if you just think deeply about its core principles, you will find they can be applied to any situation and any doubts you were harboring will turn out to be incorrect.

I am all too familiar with this pattern because it's also how fundamentalist Christianity works. The second time Delaney talked about her doubts about the applicability of stoicism and then claimed a few pages later that those doubts disappeared with additional thought and discussion, my radar went off. This book was sounding less like a thoughtful examination of one specific philosophy out of many and more like the soothing adoption of religious certainty by a convert. I was therefore entirely unsurprised when Delaney all but says outright in the epilogue that she's adopted stoicism as her religion and approaches it with the same dedicated practice that she used to bring to Catholicism. I think this is where a lot of self-help books end up, although most of them don't admit it.

There's nothing wrong with this, to be clear. It sounds like she was looking for a non-theistic religion, found one that she liked, and is excited to tell other people about it. But it's a profound mismatch with what I was looking for in an introduction to stoicism. I wanted context, history, and a frank discussion of the problems with adopting philosophy to everyday issues. I also wanted some acknowledgment that it is highly unlikely that a few men who lived 2000 years ago in a wildly different social context, and with drastically limited information about cultures other than their own, figured out a foolproof recipe for how to approach life. The subsequent two millennia of philosophical debates prove that stoicism didn't end the argument, and that a lot of other philosophers thought that stoicism got a few things wrong. You would never know that from this book.

What I wanted is outside the scope of this sort of undemanding self-help book, though, and this is the problem that I keep having with philosophy. The books I happen across are either nigh-incomprehensibly dense and academic, or they're simplified into catechism. This was the latter. That's probably more the fault of my reading selection than it is the fault of the book, but it was still annoying.

What I will say for this book, and what I suspect may be the most useful property of self-help books in general, is that it prompts you to think about basic stoic principles without getting in the way of your thoughts. It's like background music for the brain: nothing Delaney wrote was very thorny or engaging, but she kept quietly and persistently repeating the basic stoic formula and turning my thoughts back to it. Some of those thoughts may have been useful? As a source of prompts for me to ponder, Reasons Not to Worry was therefore somewhat successful. The concept of not trying to control things outside of my control is simple but valid, and it probably didn't hurt me to spend a week thinking about it.

"It kind of works as an undemanding meditation aid" is not a good enough reason for me to recommend this book, but maybe that's what someone else is looking for.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: The Shepherd's Crown, by Terry Pratchett

The Shepherd's Crown is the 41st and final Discworld novel and the 5th and final Tiffany Aching novel. You should not start here.

There is a pretty major character event in the second chapter of this book. I'm not going to say directly what it is, but you will likely be able to guess from the rest of the review. If you're particularly adverse to spoilers, you may want to skip reading this until you've read the book.

Tiffany Aching is extremely busy. Witches are responsible for all the little tasks that fall between the cracks, and there are a lot of cracks. The better she gets at her job, the more of the job there seems to be.

"Well," said Tiffany, "there's too much to be done and not enough people to do it."

The smile that the kelda gave her was a strange one. The little woman said, "Do ye let them try? Ye mustn't be afraid to ask for help. Pride is a good thing, my girl, but it will kill you in time."

And that's before an earth-shattering change in the world of witches, one that leaves Tiffany shuttling between Lancre and the Chalk trying to be too many things to too many people. Plus the kelda is worried some deeper trouble is brewing. And then Tiffany gets an exiled elven queen who has never understood the worth of other people dumped on her, and has to figure out what to do with her.

The starting idea is great. I continue to be impressed with how well Pratchett handles Tiffany's coming-of-age story. Finding one's place in the world isn't one lesson or event; it's layers of them, with each new growth in responsibility uncovering new things to learn that are often quite different from the previous problems. Tiffany has worked through child problems, adolescent problems, and new adulthood problems. Now she's on a course towards burnout, which is exactly the kind of problem Tiffany would have given her personality.

Even better, the writing at the start of The Shepherd's Crown is tight and controlled and sounds like Pratchett, which was a relief after the mess of Raising Steam. The contrast is so sharp that I found myself wondering if parts of this book had been written earlier, or if Pratchett found a new writing or editing method. The characters all sound like themselves, and although some of the turns of phrase are not quite as sharp as in earlier books, they're at least at the level of Snuff.

Unfortunately, it doesn't last. There are some great moments and some good quotes, but the writing starts to slip at about the two-thirds point, the sentences began to meander, the characters start repeating the name of the person they're talking to, and the narration becomes increasingly strained. It felt like Pratchett knew the emotional tone he wanted to evoke but couldn't find a subtle way to express it, so the story and the characters start to bludgeon the reader with Grand Statements. It's never as bad as Raising Steam, but it doesn't slip smoothly off the page to rewrite your brain the way that Pratchett could at his best.

What makes this worse is that the plot is not very interesting. I wanted to read a book about Tiffany understanding burnout, asking for help, and possibly also about mental load and how difficult delegation is. There is some movement in that direction: she takes on some apprentices, although we don't see as much of her interactions with them as I'd like, and there's an intriguing new male character who wants to be a witch. I wish Pratchett had been able to give Geoffrey his own book. He and his goat were the best part of the story, but it felt rushed and I think he would have had more impact if the reader got to see him develop his skills over time the way that we did with Tiffany.

But, alas, all of that is side story to the main plot, which is about elves.

As you may know from previous reviews, I do not get along with Pratchett's conception of elves. I find them boring and too obviously evil, and have since Lords and Ladies. Villains have never been one of Pratchett's strengths, and I think his elves are my least favorite. One of the goals of this book is to try to make them less one-note by having Tiffany try to teach one of them empathy, but I didn't find any of the queen's story arc convincing. If Pratchett had pulled those threads together with something more subtle, emotional, and subversive, I think it could have worked, but instead we got another battle royale, and Lords and Ladies did that better.

"Granny never said as she was better than others. She just got on with it and showed 'em and people worked it out for themselves."

And so we come to the end. I wish I could say that the quality held up through the whole series, and it nearly did, but alas it fell apart a bit at the end. Raising Steam I would skip entirely. The Shepherd's Crown is not that bad, but it's minor Pratchett that's worth reading mainly because it's the send-off (and there are a lot of reasons within the story to think Pratchett knew that when writing it). There are a few great lines, some catharsis, and a pretty solid ending for Tiffany, but it's probably not a book that I'll re-read.

Content warning: major character death.

Special thanks to Emmet Asher-Perrin, whose Tor.com/Reactor re-read of all of Discworld got me to pick the series up again and finally commit to reading all of it. I'm very glad I did.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher

Thornhedge is a fantasy novella by T. Kingfisher, the pen name that Ursula Vernon uses for her adult writing. It won the 2024 Hugo Award for best novella. No matter how much my brain wants to misspell the title, it is a story about a hedge, not a Neolithic earthwork.

The fairy was the greenish-tan color of mushroom stems and her skin bruised blue-black, like mushroom flesh. She had a broad, frog-like face and waterweed hair. She was neither beautiful nor made of malice, as many of the Fair Folk are said to be.

There is a princess asleep in a tower, surrounded by a wall of thorns. Toadling's job is to keep anyone from foolishly breaking in. At first, it was a constant struggle and all that she could manage, but with time, the flood of princes slowed to a trickle. A road was built and abandoned. People fled. There was a plague. With any luck, the tower was finally forgotten.

Then a knight shows up. Not a very rich knight, nor a very successful knight. Just a polite and very persistent knight who wants to get into the tower that Toadling does not want him to get into.

As you might have guessed, this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. As you may have also guessed from the author, or from the cover text that says "not all curses should be broken," this version is a bit different. How and why it departs from the original is a surprise that slowly unfolds over the course of the story, in parallel to a delicate, cautious, and delightfully kind-hearted conversation between the knight and the fairy.

If you have read a T. Kingfisher story before, particularly one of her fractured fairy tales, you know what to expect. Toadling is one of her typical well-meaning, earnest, slightly awkward protagonists who is just trying to do the right thing in a confusing world full of problems and dangers. She's constantly overwhelmed and yet she keeps going, because what else is there to do. Like a lot of Kingfisher's writing, it's a story about quiet courage from someone who doesn't consider herself courageous. One of the twists this time is that the knight is a character from a similar vein: doggedly unwilling to leave any problem alone, but equally determined to try to be kind. The two of them together make for a story with a gentle and rather melancholy tone.

We do, eventually, learn the whole backstory of the tower, the wall of thorns, and Toadling. There is a god, a rather memorable one, who is frustratingly cryptic in the way that gods are. There are monsters who are more loving than most humans. There are humans who turn out to be surprisingly decent when it matters. And, like most of Kingfisher's writing, there is a constant awareness of how complicated the world is, how full it is of people who are just trying to get through each day, and how heavy of burdens people can shoulder when they don't see another way.

This story pulled me right in. It is not horror, although there are a few odd bits like there always are in Kingfisher stories. Your largest risk as a reader is that it might make you cry if stories about earnest people doing their best in overwhelming situations hit you that way. My primary complaint is that there was nowhere near enough ending for me. After everything I learned about the characters, I wanted to spend some time with them outside of the bounds of the story. Kingfisher points the reader in a direction and then leaves the rest to your imagination, and I can see why she chose that story construction, but I wanted more catharsis than I got.

That complaint aside, this is quintessential T. Kingfisher, and I am unsurprised that it won a Hugo. If you've read any of her other fractured fairy tales, or the 2023 Hugo winner for best novel, you know the sort of stories she tells, and you probably know whether you will like this. I am one of the people who like this.

Rating: 8 out of 10