When life gives you a queer Sleeping Beauty retelling, you read it.
This was a fun sleeping beauty retelling that really played with the source material! I think we’ve all gotten tired of verbatim retellings, and I come here to say this isn’t like that! I enjoyed the characters and their relationships with one another. I also liked how much history – and knowledge of it – played a role in this. It makes my historian heart happy.
Fi is a character who is all about knowledge and the power it has. She can be so singularly focused on the historical aspects of her search that she gets herself into a sticky situation now and then (but especially now lol). When her curiosity gets the better of her, she becomes attached to the ghost? spirit? entity? of Briar Rose. Briar Rose is under a spell, asleep forever until woken by true loves kiss. Briar is eager and excited to have someone to talk to, and hopefully someone to break his curse with. Fi is a little less eager. In fact, she’s a little miffed at the situation. She resentfully starts a relationship with Briar, but she finds that she doesn’t hate it as much as she initially did.
Shane is more of a brute force type of gal. She’s all about swinging her axe and telling people off. She fights before she thinks. She’s comfortable going toe-to-toe with even the roughest of witch hunters. She finds a witch named Red, and instantly falls for her. Red warns her not to fall in love with her, but Shane can’t help herself. But will she be able to save Red? Or will Red be the reason for her downfall?
Together Fi and Shane make for an unlikely duo that’s full of snark and jabs. I don’t want to give too much away, but the way their relationship grew over the course of the book was great, and I can’t wait to see how it changes in the next book.
I really hope this is just a duology because idk if I could wait for a third book. It feels like a duology, but we all know how publishers like to drag a story out unnecessarily.
Just Read It 