A gender-swapped take on sleeping beauty, with a splash of magic, queer-rep characters and a budding romance - my pants were well and truly charmed off by our adventuring trio.
"A drop of blood, a drop of hope. The sleep of death broken with a single kiss."
Book Title: The Bone Spindle
Publishing Date: 3 February 2022
Social Medias: @leslievedder
★★★★★
Kiss the Prince. Break the curse.
This book was really captivating and held me from the very first page. One of the things I loved instantly was the description and tone of the book - historical, but with an undeniable fantasy element. We entered the story in the middle of a darkened tavern, depicted as 'dingy' and 'roughing it'-- really setting the mood for the adventure to come.
Fi, our quiet, history-loving treasure hunter teams up with Shane, who is quite the opposite - a brash, axe-wielding Huntsman with a a lot of sass. The two intend to take on just one quest together and go their separate ways once they've found the treasure, but things don't always go to plan.. Stumbling across a ruin who's walls feature the words of an old legend, they find themselves thrown into a journey to find the Prince and awaken him from his 100 year old slumber.
Each chapter throughout follows one of our three main characters in turn, something I really appreciate in order to see all sides of what was happening. I think this was done particularly well, as each character had a very distinctive personality and it was easy to pick apart who was taking lead. Our characters were really well executed, with snippets of their backstories added in too (which I hope to see more of!) and lots of twists and turns that added to the suspense over whether or not they would make it to our slumbering castle.
Fi is really clever, interested in the history of the Kingdom and it's magical artefacts, loving to explore the ruins and the beautiful places the expedition took her on - I really felt it easy to connect to and relate to her. But she did have some underlying troubles, too. A spiteful ex and a curse of her own to carry that keeps her from the people she loves. Shane is a head strong fighter with her own family history that she was running from, which I thoroughly enjoyed learning about as it really pushed the boundary on gender stereotypes/expectations.
“A girl under a curse meets a boy under a curse. It sounded like the beginning of one of those cautionary fables where everyone ended up worse off than they started.“
Briar Rose, our sleeping Prince, is easily one of my favourite characters. With him being spelled asleep and not physically with them, I loved reading his chapters and seeing more of him within the confines of the castle and how he was feeling about meeting the one destined to break his curse. The relationship building between him and Fi was very subtle and slow-burning, which was a welcomed and refreshing change to the commonly written insta-love trope. Seeing their connection blossom and their fun banter come out more as the adventure progressed was lovely.
The whole plot was very fast paced and we weren't left waiting, it kept me on my toes and the twists were really unpredictable. I haven't stopped thinking about this book and I am eagerly awaiting a sequel!
Are you a lover of retellings, would you pick this book up? (You should!)
* I was very kindly sent an ARC of this book in return for an honest review, a big thank you to Netgalley and publishers.
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