RogerBW's Blog

2023 fantasy novella. The fairy has been guarding the wall of thorns around the keep where the princess sleeps, and then the knight arrives.

But, of course, it's Kingfisher, and especially when she does fairy tales she looks at the people first. Why would the Sleeping Beauty setup happen? Even with the known whimsy of the fair folk, they usually have some sort of reason for doing a thing, even if it only makes sense to them.

But the discovery of what's going on is an important part of the story, as is the history of how the fairy got into this position, and so I won't spoil either. Which doesn't leave much to talk about, though there's also a glance at a really interesting alternate history around Justinian's plague and a migration of Muslims into the largely depopulated lands of Europe, not perhaps intended to be load-bearing but great fun to play with even so.

I went in with no expectations and very much enjoyed this; some readers seem to have been disappointed, because this isn't quite any of the obvious twists on the story that it might have been. But I loved it.