The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Come help me stir the pot” Leigh Bardugo’s The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic (2017) is a well-written collection of six fairy tales set in her secondary world of the “Grishaverse.” Each story is a vivid and clever modern adaptation (pot stirring) of a different kind of fairy tale. Bardugo likes to trick the reader with twists wherein she revises or reforms traditional fairy tales by, for instance, making the apparent monster a protector and the apparent victim a monster. The stories have some gruesome bits but mostly feature relatively happy endings (though the reader can’t get TOO comfortable). Here is an annotated listing of the stories. “Ayama and the Thorn Wood” might be called, “Ugly and the Beast.” OK, Ayama is not really ugly, though people (including her family) treat her as such, maybe because her voice is hard on the ears. The story is reminiscent of Angela Carter’s reworking of “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Tiger’s Bride,” with some Scheherazade action for good measure (featuring three stories, not 1001). The story features a pair of overlooked second siblings, a slimy king, a greedy grandmother, a forest full of thorns, and an enchanted pool. The point of the story is that truth rules, especially in stories, so feel free to change the traditional lame happy endings according to your own experience of life. “The Too-Clever Fox” begins as a beast fable and ends as a human monster hunt from the point of view of animal victims. The story features a scrawny, ugly, clever fox (Bardugo likes telling stories about physically unattractive, intelligent, and plucky protagonists), a helpful nightingale, a super hunter and his mournful sister, and a scary revelation and climax. “The Witch of Duva” plays with Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel, featuring a long famine, a serial killer of girls, a shape-changing spirit, a witch in the woods, and a daughter who says she wants to go home. It has delicious listings of foods and some creepy gingerbread and crow magic. “Little Knife” revises the traditional fairy tale where the ruler (here a duke) sets increasingly impossible tasks for his daughter’s suitors to perform before he’ll let anyone marry her. Add to this scenario an obedient but finally independent daughter and a helpful but finally independent river and some selfish men who won’t listen to good questions, with even a dash of Shel Silverstein’s *appalling* The Giving Tree, and you get an idea of this tale. “The Soldier Prince” is an interesting take on the Nutcracker fairy tale, featuring a clocksmith who makes marvelous human automata who do bad things, a dreamy tea merchant’s daughter who wants to live in a world of fantasy, and a nutcracker who has trouble thinking of himself and his own desires (until he’s visited by the Rat King). It has a satisfying resolution. “When Water Sang Fire” is a vivid adaptation of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” or rather is an origin story for a key character in that story. The themes about the creative and destructive power of desires as well as the imagination of the undersea world of the merfolk and their relations with mortals ashore and the climax are compelling, though I lost patience with the protagonist a few times. Bardugo writes potent descriptions, like “Her throat was dry as burnt bread,” “The night their second son was born, the full moon rose brown as an old scab in the sky,” and “Weeks in the sun had turned his skin gold, his hair white. He looked like a petulant dandelion, gathering breath to throw a tantrum.” The best similes she writes are suited to the settings or situations or personalities of her characters, as when the sea folk prince Roffe tells Ulla, “I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.” Some stories have effective morals, like “to use a thing is not to own it” and “sometimes the unseen is not to be feared, and sometimes those who should love us most do not,” and “There is no pain like the pain of transformation.” The stories in the printed book feature lovely marginal illustrations, and each story has a color code, red or blue, for both illustrations and font. The audiobook obviously lacks the colors of the physical book, but does feature a capable reader in Lauren Fortgang, who does some neat voices for some extreme characters (like the Beast and the Rat King) and doesn’t try too hard to be male for male voices and enhances the stories. I hadn’t read anything by Leigh Bardugo before but may try more after this. View all my reviews
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