Reviews with content warning for Murder - Thorn

This is a deeply captivating book that examines what is family, justice, and identity, all wrapped in a wonderful fantasy world, rich characters, and a sweet romance.

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jennabenna's review against another edition

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4.5

This book was about healing from trauma, and finding yourself and your strength in the face of societal injustices. I loved the slow, introspective pacing of the story, and the way that Thorn grew into herself and her purpose. The found family, the politics, the tiny sprinkling of romance. I really loved this book!

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teri_b's review against another edition

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challenging dark hopeful tense

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I loved following this story unfold, listening to the audiobook from my local library. I got to discover a new world and the story of the possibility of a better life for Princess Alyrra.

Loved the worldbuilding and also the character development of the female main character as she is all of a sudden on her own and can make her own choices.

Considering where she is coming from, her family does not think much of her, I really loved her story ark.

On the whole this is rather a dark book, touching down on some rather difficult topics. Some of them I have not yet encountered in my YA readings over the last couple of years and I think the author does a really good job to discuss them through the story she tells.

Really, really worthwhile to read.

And then there is the short story at the end of this book.

And I just wished I could get more from this story as that was just fabulous story telling weaving fairy tales, the fae and a disabled main character together into a story that feels very, very strong and exciting. And I just wanted more.

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animaepanda's review against another edition

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Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

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3mmers's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I often feel kind of bad about not liking a book, especially when there are confounding factors like obvious effort to represent marginalized groups/experiences or genuine recommendation from a friend. And I have never felt worse about not liking a book than I have about not liking Thorn. It’s clear a lot of care has been put into making this a story for people who usually don’t get stories. Objectively I can see how it works and why people like it. I should like it. But I don’t, at all. I only finished this book by assigning myself a certain number of pages to read every night. I wouldn’t have pushed through if the sequel hadn’t come so highly recommended. While logically I understand and even relate to the protagonist, emotionally I cannot like her. And yes, that does make me feel like a bad person.

Let me explain. While the paralysis and inertia caused by severe anxiety and depression are valid and sympathetic problems in real life, problems that I have spent a lot of my real life experiencing, it is much harder to make them compelling in fiction because they are inherently narratively frustrating. It would be unreasonable to expect a satisfying ending in real life, but it is fair to expect it from a story (hence the absolute plague of slightly ahistoric music biopics). Also, while fictional representation of the suffering caused by depression and anxiety can be relatable and comforting to some readers, it will not be for all of them. I hate the person I am when I’m at my most anxious. Genuinely. And I hate seeing my least favourite self reflected in others, fictional or otherwise. This might sound mean, because it is (like I said, I feel bad), but my continual frustration with the protagonist was the defining aspect of my reading experience. It was inescapable and it 100% ruined the book.

Sorry Thorn, no one wishes I liked you more than I do.

Alyrra is the unhappy princess of a small nation but her political engagement to prince Kestrin promises to take her away from the prison of her abusive brother and apathetic mother. Kestrin needs a bride he can trust after his ancestors all died mysteriously due to a curse inflicted by a powerful and vengeful fey known as the Lady. Alyrra departs for her new life but in a final twist of the knife she is accompanied by Valka, her childhood enemy. Valka immediately betrays her to the Lady, who switches their bodies. Now Valka is a conniving and treacherous princess and Alyrra is an unfavoured lady-in-waiting. In order to get her out of the way, Valka demotes Alyrra to goose girl. It would be a humiliating fall for anyone else, but Alyrra embraces the safety and simplicity of a life free from the high stakes politics of court. She takes the name Thorn and eventually befriends the other servants and stablehands. Alyrra may feel safer out of the spotlight, but Kestrin is in more danger than ever now that his fiance has been replaced with an agent of the Lady. And while Alyrra is free from the court, the stables present their own set of dangers that the nobles never see.
Wills she be able to overcome her paralysing self-esteem issues and accept that she is capable of making positive change in this world before it eats her alive?

Thorn is composed of two arcs. First, the external conflict of Alyrra vs the Lady. Alyrra has to keep the Lady from killing her fiance and his family and she’d also quite like her original body back. Second, the internal conflict of Alyrra’s emotional growth. After a lifetime of abuse from her mother and brother, her self-esteem is at rock bottom. She’s certain that she couldn’t do anything to help and that getting involved in the situation would only make things worse. If she’s going to save Kestrin and get her body back, she’ll need to come to terms with the fact that she can. The two are parallels. Alyrra’s emotional strength is essential to her political and physical well-being. Interlinking two arcs like this is generally a very good idea since it helps crate satisfying story payoff, however, in this case neither arc works as intended.

Thorn’s external plot arc didn’t actually trouble me that much while reading. It results in an unsatisfying story, but it is really only bad upon reflection. I heard this sort of thing referred to online as a fridge fallacy, in other words, a problem you only notice after standing up and staring blankly at the fridge for a several minutes. The external conflict feels weak because the Lady isn’t actually Alyrra’s antagonist. She’s Kestrin’s. The Lady doesn’t have any quarrel with Alyrra and acts against her only because she’d be helping Kestrin. During the period when Alyrra recuses herself from politics and avoids the prince, the Lady leaves her be. Alyrra also has no reason to side with the prince. She’s never met him when the story begins and though the engagement saves her from her abusive family, Kestrin offers it out of political expediency not kindness. The story gives us no good reason for Alyrra to care so much about this plot. Politically it would help her, but the story establishes over and over that she isn’t wily and hates politics. Being so committed makes her seem naive, and unhealthily self-sacrificing, which is a problem because this conflict is meant to show her overcoming that flaw. Alyrra has her own antagonists: her abusive family members, that’s who she needs to overcome to show her growth. Overcoming the Lady indicates less emotional strength than it does an unhealthy dedication to someone else’s problems.

Alyrra does stand up to her family as part of a subplot in the sequel, but this is the wrong way around. The Lady should be the subplot with the family as the main course.

The internal plot failed for me for much more subjective reasons. Overcoming paralysingly low self-esteem and anxiety is a sympathetic and tough struggle — in real life. It does not work in fiction. There is a reason protagonists tend to be highly motivated to take action and that is because it is boring to read about a character doing nothing. A passive protagonist isn’t always a deal breaker. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire uses time skips to jump over the long periods where the characters don’t work towards their goal and include only the good parts. In Thorn’s case however, the protagonist’s reluctance to act also causes problems with likeability. In other words, the reason that Alyrra isn’t doing anything doesn’t change how frustrating it is, and her constant mental anguish over whether she should or could do anything did not so much avert the boredom as add insufferable self-recrimination to the experience. Here is the thing about relatable issues: it is not always fun to be confronted with your own problems. While some may be comforted by the representation, there will also be those who hate having to witness the worst and most frustrating part of themselves. I do not like the person I become when I am paralysed by anxiety. I don’t like it in the moment and I don’t like looking back at it. Thinking the things I do, or rather don’t do thanks to depression inertia, is viscerally upsetting to me. The traits I hate most in other people are the ones I see in myself. And yeah, I hated Alyrra. I hated her more and more as the book when on and she kept doing nothing. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, and shout ‘is nothing more important than this image you have of yourself? Just get over yourself!!’ When I’m in a deep anxiety funk I can feel a part of my brain trying to grab the rest of it and say the same thing. It never works, but it absolutely fucking sucks to be confronted with a mirror of yourself who doesn’t want to do better and who won’t pursue anything to improve. To be clear, that’s a preference to explain my disappointment. If you hold the opposite opinion and like the book for the same reason, that’s fine. This isn’t why I though the book was bad, just why I didn’t like it.

As for why it’s bad, at a certain point the justification behind the fear and inaction stops being important. For me this came close to the middle of the book. Alyrra has an animal companion, a magical talking Horse named Falada, who encourages and supports her as the only character who knows her identity has been switched.

Valka decides to kill Falada in order to hurt Alyrra, and Alyrra just… lets it happen. She doesn’t do anything! She doesn’t even try! She repays his kindness by letting him die because she is too cowardly to try to save him.

And cowardly is the term here, because though unflattering it describes someone unable to overcome their fear. It was in this scene that I lost any care for Alyrra.

She sent her friend and animal companion to his death through her inaction! Falada’s death was a moral event horizon where Alyrra crossed from a character that made unoptimal decisions but who ultimately we cheered for, to a character whose mental health problems have caused them to become a genuinely bad person.

While passive protagonists can be addressed, I strongly feel that this one needs deeper changes in order to work. We have a protagonist who allows some really horrible things to happen through her inaction but solves them

not by confronting her own fear but by committing herself to solving someone else’s problems. This rubs me the wrong way because the books wants us to see this as Alyrra getting better but in reality that is the same unhealthy behaviour applied in a different direction.

It is not something Alyrra ever reflects on, which leads me to believe it’s not something the book is aware of at all.

These problems with the plot structure had already pissed me off so much that my opinion of the book was probably unrecoverable, but the latter half didn’t even really try to bring it back around. Alyrra doesn’t change in any way until maybe two thirds of the way through, which is way too much page space spent languishing in depression funk. Interpreted charitably this could be an attempt to represent the necessity of the rest to the healing process, but if that is the case it fails to come across because Alyrra’s inner narration is just as cruel towards herself as it always has been. The book is stagnant, and that makes it boring. Worse, when Alyrra does eventually begin to take action, it does not follow logically from what her arc sets up.

An incident of sexual violence and murder finally provokes her into action. This is fine (although it does introduce even more themes to an already overburdened story), but feels unsatisfying. Alyrra is motivated by something she had no control over and does not ever end up changing (until the sequel), rather than by the consequences of her previous inaction. In other words, it feels like the death of Falada should have been what causes Alyrra to realize that even though she is afraid of making things worse, doing nothing is also harming herself and her friends.

She needs to claim her power of others will walk all over her.

Instead, she understandably decides that murder is a bridge too far, but she has already allowed another friend to die and done nothing. If I was feeling charitable I could interpret this as Alyrra having a stronger base of support, but since the parallel between the two is not noted in the text I do not feel charitable at all.

What else is there to say? I was really hoping the book would bringing it back around but it just never recovers

from Falada’s death.

I guess the climactic sequence was okay.

It was one of the more compelling executions of the ‘proving the villain wrong through unwavering commitment to gentleness and forgiveness’ trope that I’ve seen.

But I didn’t want Alyrra to be gentle and kind. I wanted her to stand up for herself! Say no! Feel regret for all the time she’d done nothing and resolve that if she was given power, even unwillingly, she’d use it to change things! While rejecting aggression is a fine aspiration, breaking the cycle of violence requires strength and power. You can’t have boundaries unless you enforce them. Things work themselves out in the sequel, and I found I liked sequel Alyrra far more than as the protagonist of her own novel. Unfortunately my heart did not grow three sizes that day. Instead of feeling pleased that she got the happiness and peace she deserved, I wondered why I didn’t get to see her do any of these things in her own book. Sequel Alyrra seems to be on the path to recovery. She’s standing up to herself. She has the support and protection of her new allies and fiancé. That is the mental illness representation I want. I don’t want my worst moments reflected back at me, I want to read about hope.

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mynotsolittlelibrary's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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saurahsaurus's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

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