Such an interesting Sleeping Beauty retelling with a focus on fairies and changelings and a kinda ambiguous take on who is the princess and who is the fairy that cursed her—it kind of works both ways. It has as much heart as I’ve come to expect from T. Kingfisher’s novellas, and it’s everything a story about faeries should be: beautiful, slightly creepy, and fair in the most unfair of ways.

I really liked Toadling, the MC who was stolen as a kid and raised by scary bog fae who genuinely loved her and then was given a mission by a hare goddess, and Halim, the very nice knight who shows up to rescue a princess from a tower but is willing to listen and learn and genuinely figure out what’s up. What endeared me to them especially is how kind they both are. While I love digging into the psyche of flawed characters, I also sometimes just love reading about genuinely good people trying their best, and this book absolutely delivers on that front. 

The funny thing about the central plot element is, if I were to read this story a few years ago, I would have probably given it a far lower rating and grumbled at Fontaine being just evil because she’s evil and it’s her nature to be evil and she can’t be redeemed, only contained and destroyed. This would have felt so flat and simplistic—and yet now, looking at the political realities we live in, I find this to be such a good and meaningful part of the story. Sometimes, evil is just evil (though admittedly usually through choice and not because it’s inherent and inevitable), and the truly kind and good thing is to destroy it if you can.

The prose here is evocative and sometimes quirky, the fairy tale vibes are ever-thick, and the ending is hopeful with a subtle touch of bittersweet. There’s something so soothing and cozy about this book, despite the darker sides of fae lore woven into the narrative. Highly recommended.