Bryony and Roses (T. Kingfisher)

Bryony and Roses
T. Kingfisher
Red Wombat Tea Company
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It never would've happened but for the rutabagas. But Bryony's garden keeps her and her two sisters fed, and she needed more vegetables, so she and the clumsy family pony Fumblefoot set off... never expecting to get caught in a snowstorm on the way back through the woods. When she stumbles upon a manor house deep in the forest, it seemed a stroke of luck, and if there seemed to be something uncanny and a touch magical about the way its doors opened and food appeared (even food for a hungry pony) with no sign of humans about, well, women on the edge of freezing to death can't exactly pick and choose their salvation. It's only when she tries to leave and finds herself facing a hulking Beast that she realizes the trap she's fallen into. But is it he who keeps her imprisoned here, or is it some other, more insidious force... and, if so, is there any way to escape the curse that's entangled her?

REVIEW: As one might expect, this is yet another retelling of the familiar "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale, but this "Beauty" is no helpless damsel traded away by a greedy father, nor is breaking the curse as easy as learning to love a hulking "monster" with a human heart. Bryony is a gardener down to her marrow; when her late father squandered the family name and fortune and left his three daughters nothing but an out-of-the-way cottage in an out-of-the-way little town, she felt more relieved than devastated, finally able to indulge her passion without being forever chided about dirt under her nails. She's not a classical "beauty", either; her sister Iris got the family good looks, as well as a flair for playing the victim/helpless damsel in distress, while Bryony and her no-nonsense sister Holly are more plain-faced. When she first realizes she can never leave the House in the woods, she misses her garden at least as much as her own kin. This gives her a more practical bent than many classic fairy tale heroines, though she's also not notably brave or a warrior by any means; more than once she lets her fear get the better of her, though generally (and especially later on) that fear is quite justified by the circumstances. The Beast, meanwhile, is rarely anything but a gentleman from the start, as much a prisoner as she herself is. He has long ago become resigned to his fate, and regrets that she, too, is trapped with him, but her presence also offers a slim and painful hope of escape and freedom - if she can figure out how; every time he tries to tell her the origins and conditions of their imprisonment, the forces behind it seem to hear and act to silence them by increasingly malevolent means. Thus they have to find roundabout ways to communicate, when they can talk of it at all. Bryony sometimes seems slightly slow on the uptake about a few points, but manages to come through when it counts, and she and the Beast have a genuine connection and chemistry. It all makes for a reasonably satisfying tale.

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