I enjoyed the vivid descriptions Burke offers, and I haven’t been that creeped out by a flower since watching The Ruins. The Huntress doesn’t delay in retrieving her stolen property. When a hunting party crosses the threshold of her lands and kills two of the Huntress’ wolf companions, Rowan’s father, one of the unfortunate trespassers, is spared by the Huntress only to commit the more serious crime of stealing a white rose. Our beast has been condemned to a life of solitude, and the cold and loneliness in the story are very much intertwined. Winter isn’t just coming, it’s there all the time within the boundaries of her land. But she and the curse that keeps her confined to the mountain are very real. The Huntress, our cruel and mysterious “beast”, is something of a legend and a myth for those living in the nearby village. It doesn’t take long for us to get an idea that Rowan doesn’t love her homelife. On top of it all, she absolutely hates living in this godforsaken, frozen little village. It’s here we also find out that she’s betrothed to the neighbor’s son (let’s call him baby Gaston) and would very much prefer not to be. As the eldest, there’s a lot of pressure on her to take care of the family. When we first meet Rowan, we see how different she is from her sisters. While he’s not a villain by any means, he treats his children as commodities, and is preoccupied with returning to some status in society. Rowan’s father, a failed merchant turned aspiring fur trader, has had no choice but to flee the city with his three daughters and start a new life to escape his debts. A very cold, very isolated place that one wouldn’t necessarily choose to live. This dark, Grimm style and very gay retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” kept me reading well past midnight to get just “one more page!” Thorn, with its complex characters and their histories, goes so much further than just subbing in perpetually hungry wolves and a large ice bear for talking candles and singing teapots.īurke does a great job with world building, and it doesn’t take long to get a sense of where you and our young protagonist, Rowan, have just been dropped.
My recent infatuation with the Compass Rose series should have been all the warning I needed not to start an Anna Burke book just before bedtime.
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