This was a reread for me but it was a book club choice and it had been long enough since I read that I was a little fuzzy on the details (also, I’m not sure if I simply read them around the same time or if the authors approached their descriptions in similar ways but the changeling in this novella strongly reminds me of the possessed kid or changelings child in the Emily Wilde novel).
This is an alternate version of Sleeping Beauty where Sleeping Beauty is evil, and the evil fairy is a good, kind young woman who is in over her head, settling on the sleep spell as the only way to prevent further evil from being done. After years of standing guard to keep the evil contained, hoping the world would forget, a knight appears at the hedges to investigate the story of the castle and the maiden he discovered in a book.
Toadling, the king and Queen, and even the evil changeling are all just playthings in someone else’s prank, lives ruined because they could. Since time works differently in Fairy, Toadling finds out early in the novella that the changeling took her space and that is the reason she must go back to save what should have been her family and people, even if she has discovered her space and family in Fairy. It was only supposed to be a short errand but when Toadling fumbles the blessing, she chooses to take responsibility and stay to prevent harm from occurring.
If you like T. Kingfisher, then of course you should read this one, and if you haven’t read her before, this is a perfect and short introduction to her tone and approach. She has such care for her characters, and rather than focusing on greater than life characters, she creates characters that are kind and trying to do what’s right in any circumstance – exactly the kind of people (and message) we need in this day and age.
