Author: Merrie Haskell
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!
This novel is a mashup-up of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, but the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts for, building upon that slim foundation, Heskell makes this entirely her own story, and a classical job she does of it, too. You won't find any pathetic love triangles here. You won't find bitchy girls, or studly boys with hair in their eyes. No poseurs here, only real characters who are richly drawn and fascinating, each in their own way.
Alexander, son of Gilles, the blacksmith, wakes up in the fireplace of an old castle - a castle which he has known, from the outside, all his life, and which has been abandoned for for far longer than he's known it. The castle, so he learned growing up, was destroyed in an earthquake, and there is such an intense thicket of brambles surrounding it that no one can enter.
"Sand" begins exploring the place to try and find a way out - and there isn't one. When he approaches the brambles, he ends up with a thorn deeply embedded in his wrist, which slowly begins to poison him, until he manages to dig it out with a spike he himself forged in the castle's smithy.
During his explorations, he discovers that this castle was not destroyed in an earthquake, because such natural disasters don't do the damage he sees everywhere he looks. Nothing is whole, everything is torn or broken in two, every stick of furniture, every bed-sheet, every wall and door, every item of food - food which far from rotting seems to have been dehydrated and, aside from being torn in twain, has also been preserved like a mummy, exactly as it was when alive minus the moisture.
Once he realizes that the food is edible if cooked, and once he figures out how to get a supply of water from the well without using a bucket (all of the pots, pans, utensils, bowls and buckets are broken, too), the next thing he discovers is his loneliness. He 'fixes' this by carrying a stuffed osprey around with him and talking to it. He had to fix that, too, since it had a broken leg.
'
Fixing is what keeps him going from day to day, and he even fixes a dead girl. He finds her on the floor in the crypt, her coffin broken and her dessicated corpse lying horribly twisted. - of all the burials there, hers was the only one in disarray. Sand cleans up the rubble and rearranges her body in a more comfortable pose, before continuing with his exploration.
Imagine his astonishment then, when the stuffed osprey returns to life. It's at this point that he realizes there is something more going on here than is dreamed of in philosophy. It was not a natural disaster which destroyed the castle, but an unnatural one. It isn't his amateur blacksmithing skills which fix things so perfectly well, but some unknown magical quantity lending its assistance.
But the magic really begins to show when the girl herself returns to life. Contrary to Sand's conviction that he was lord and master of his own private castle, he now discovers that it actually belongs to the girl, Perrotte, a princess who died before her time. But what exactly happened to this princess when she died? And how does she know Sand's father?
This is the real secret behind the thorns, and the author does an amazing job of relating it. I have to confess that I'm not sure what she thought she was up to with her habit of using curiously shortened names. She reduces Alexander to Sand (as in hourglass sand?!) and he reduces Perrotte to Perr - which curiously sounds like purr. Hmm!
I went into this with nothing other than curiosity and I came out of it as satisfied as it's possible to become. This is a middle-grade bordering on young-adult novel for all ages. It's charming, beautifully written, inventive, and completely engrossing. I highly recommend it.
