Alix E. Harrow is one of my favorite authors, so as part of my quest to read just about everything she’s written, I dove into her short story The Six Deaths of the Saint. It was unexpected and intense and emotional, though it’s hard to share much without getting into spoiler territory. It also contains a mix of 1st and 2nd person perspective. The story starts with the Saint of War showing up to a poor, nameless orphan and the Saint helps her become a famous warrior for a Prince, but things may not all be as they seem.
This is a dark, character-driven fantasy that explores the price of fame and the endurance of unconditional love. The character of the warrior, whom the Prince has christened his “Devil” is single-minded in her devotion to the Prince but slowly realizes that perhaps there should be more to life than that.
Harrow’s tendency toward descriptive prose is noticeable even within the confines of a short story, such as “You had fallen ill again, in the tiresome and inevitable way of the underfed. . .” or “Your kingdom, once small and unremarkable, had grown fat, spilling over its borders like flesh around a tourniquet.”
I loved this story. It’s bittersweet at best, but it was so good and has really stuck with me, and I plan to seek out more of Harrow’s short stories.
Next up was Tamsyn Muir’s Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower. I felt the urge to explore more of Muir’s work after devouring The Locked Tomb trilogy. This novella is a dark-ish satirical fairy tale. Princess Floralinda has been imprisoned by a witch at the top of a 40-flight tower, and each flight has a monster of some sort to get past. At first, many princes come to rescue her, but they don’t make it past the dragon on the first floor of the tower, and then they stop coming at all. With the help of an injured fairy named Cobweb, Princess Floralinda begins to battle her way to the bottom of the tower.
I called this “dark-ish” because at first it feels fairly light-hearted, and some of the violence seems to have an almost cartoonish quality at times (e.g., when Floralinda throws a goblin out of the window: “Floralinda was too high up to hear it go SPLAT, but she fancied that would have been the appropriate noise”). There are amusing and satirical comments, sometimes parenthetical, throughout the book. However, Floralinda is grappling with the danger of being in an unheated tower as winter approaches, there are violent creatures in the tower who want to eat her and which she kills, and her character changes significantly as she grows in physical skill and begins to view the world differently.
I appreciated the LGBTQ+ inclusivity, particularly around gender. Cobweb doesn’t really have a gender and lets Floralinda assign it one, and Floralinda decides that Cobweb will be female. Floralinda and Cobweb to this point have not gotten along terribly well because Cobweb isn’t sympathetic to Floralinda and is quite blunt. After Floralinda decides that Cobweb would be a girl, we get the quote “‘Dear little Cobweb’ (you see attitudes change immediately). . .” A lot of the satire is around gender, particularly what it means to be female, and even more particularly what it means to be a princess.
The novella kept me entertained. There was the risk of the battles becoming repetitive, which Muir navigated by glossing over some of them pretty quickly. I can’t say that I found Floralinda or Cobweb lovable, but their dynamic was interesting to observe, as was Floralinda’s character arc from meeting social expectations of what it means to be a princess to changing enough to use the “F” word (though that word is never actually spelled out in its entirety). While I’m not sure this book is ultimately going to be be very memorable for me, I recommend it for fans of Tamsyn Muir or anyone who likes subverted fairy tales.