What doyouthink?
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237 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 11, 2014
…she’d had a few daydreams about meeting a man who would kiss her hand, and it would be like a lightning bolt through both of them, and then he’d tell her that he was really a prince wandering the land in search of the maiden of his heart, and, now that he’d found her, he would sweep her off her feet and take her back to his castle, andshe would never have to help dig an outhouse again.Lord Crevan actually tells Rhea that he is a sorcerer, but she is still unable to see any viable way out of their engagement. So when he instructs her to come to his house in three days, she goes, via a mysterious and somehow menacing bone-white road that has suddenly appeared north of town. When Rhea, at her wit’s end, stops to cry, a small, unusually intelligent hedgehog suddenly appears to comfort her. The hedgehog ― which doesn’t speak but does have an unexpected aptitude for communicating with gestures ― ends up accompanying Rhea to Lord Crevan’s manor.
Rhea’s imagination tended to get a little fuzzy after the bit where they got back to the castle, but the bit about the outhouses was very clear.
But this… this was nothing like those daydreams.
If you ground one into flour on accident, the bread had a tendency to explode in the oven, or bleed when you cut into it, or turn into a flock of starlings that would tear around the cottage, shrieking, and then people came around and had words with the miller, and many of the words had only four letters and involved hand gestures.The humor and writing style is appealing but occasionally too modern for a folk tale-like novel with a medieval setting. Kingfisher’s characters sometimes use current words or phrases like “okay” and “wait ― what?” that briefly pulled me out of my immersion in the story.
When your future husband is a mad sorcerer, following hedgehogs sometimes seems like the only option.Kingfisher working hertrademark magicand spinning a fairytale retelling as only she can + a pretty scrumptious array offemale characters+ the mostrevoltingly endearing hedgehogever + some delightfullycreepystuff + a super extra handyarmy of slugs+ a floor that fallswhenever it sees fit+ ♫ sisters aredoing it for themselves♫ =
“It is somehow easier to face things when one is not alone. Courage still does most of the heavy lifting, but Pride gets its shoulder in there, too, just to keep you from embarrassing yourself in front of the other person...or hedgehog, as the case may be.”
She could afford to be annoyed by this, because she was very nearly sure that Lord Crevan would not kill her before he married her. He seemed very interested in marriage.