I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
When Loren visits her grandmother in the small town of Lointaine so she can finish her thesis, she steps back into a life ruled by fairy tale Magic and discovers she comes from a long line of Sleeping Beauty princesses. It turns out there Magic ruling fairy tale bloodlines in Lointaine is determined to give her a tale, a prince, and a happy ending whether she likes it or not.
Spell Borne is a fun story about fighting destiny and long-ingrained social norms that have become cages to those trapped within the Magic running their lives. Told in the first person from Loren’s point of view, we follow her struggles as a young woman everyone tries to control from the moment she sets foot in her grandmother’s town. From her clothes and manners, to her profession, to her goals, Loren is told she’s not Princessy enough. She’s accused of murder, attacked, wounded, and corralled into terrible situations all by the power running the town’s inhabitants.
Ultimately Loren has to figure out which parts of the Fairy Tale Princess role she wants to keep and which parts she can chuck. In effort to avoid sleeping for a hundred years (like her grandmother) or a hundred months (like her mother), Loren and her friend Connor decide to try to shape the Magic into a Beauty and the Beast tale, preferably the Disney version.
The premise of Spell Borne immediately caught my attention: it’s really a fairy tale critique within a fairy tale, pointing out all the different versions of stories throughout the ages and commenting on social structures affecting the main characters. Unfortunately, it took me a long time to care about the characters: Loren is rather whiny at the start, and those she interacts with are a bit wooden at first. But, the weaving of fairy tale commentary and actual fairy tale gets smoother as the book goes on, the characters become much more human and complex, and the story has a few fun twists. I will say from a romance perspective it was pretty easy to see what would happen, but there were enough challenges and turns to make the journey a fun read.
There is a massive trigger warning for this book for sexual assault. In the non-Disney Sleeping Beauty tales, SB is raped while she’s asleep, and in some versions gives birth while still unconscious. I appreciated the depth of fairy tale lore in Spell Borne that shows fairy tales aren’t actually all that charming, but I thought Loren’s emotional and physical aftermath from her own attack to be a little too surface-level. It was probably appropriate for a fairy tale woman’s character, because no one really comments on the emotional and psychological trauma of being raped in fairy tales, but it felt like Loren’s fast emotional recovery and mild trauma was too easily explained away as Magic. For all the author’s obvious and wonderfully blunt feminist critique of the misogyny of fairy tales, that part fell flat for me.
Ultimately Spell Borne felt like a first novel, but it got better and better as I kept reading. I enjoyed the author’s expertise in the lore. She also clearly knows her way around creating art, sailing, and other skills I did not expect to learn about in a fairy tale. I liked Spell Borne, and I’ll definitely read book two in the series.
No Pithy Phrase 