Love speaks in flowers. Truth requires thorns
The Language of Thorns consists of six short stories, of which three already released as shorts in The Grisha series. But still a very great read.
Book Review: The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo
Rating:
Title & Author: The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Fantasy, Fairytales
Release Date: September 26 2017
Series: Standalone
Publisher: Macmillan
Synopsis
Travel to a world of dark bargains struck by moonlight, of haunted towns and hungry woods, of talking beasts and gingerbread golems, where a young mermaid’s voice can summon deadly storms and where a river might do a lovestruck boy’s bidding but only for a terrible price.
I give The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo five out of five hearts because I mostly loved it. Some small parts of the short stories I did not like as much as I had hoped, but overall it was really nice to read more Grisha Verse!
Three of the short stories were previously released as short stories in the Grisha Verse on Tor. I had already read one of them, The Witch of Duva, and the other two were The Too-Clever Fox and Little Knife. For the purpuse of this review I did not reread The Witch of Duva, because I reviewed it in one I did earlier this year, it can be found here. I did check whether anything changed with what I had read and it was not.
I loved this bind-up of these six great stories. They felt like the old fairytales, not the ones that Disney seems to love. They are gritty and sometimes harsh, they are so cool! They did have happily ever after, but before it got to that part some real bad things happened, which I really liked.
Ayama and the Thorn Wood was a great way of getting (back) into the Grisha Verse, it felt a bit removed from the rest of the Grisha Verse, only for the place names it put it in the world. But is was lovely non the less and a very strong underlying lesson.
The Too-Clever Fox was very cute. I feel like I have heard something like this already before, but I might just have read this one before without knowing. It was great non the less.
Little Knife did not much for me. It was a funny story, but I found it was one of the worse ones. But it wasn’t bad at all. Just very much like, did Semyon really not see it coming?
The Soldier Prince was also on my least favourite list, it felt too long and not really in the old fashioned style of fairytales. It bothered me a bit and it took forever to get anywhere.
When Water Sang Fire was great, it has mermaids and magic and a very big little mermaid vibe. I loved it. And the lesson was pretty clear too. It made me want to have children so I could read them these fairytales to. But that will have to wait for a couple of years. Also the harshness of the stories is not the best idea for young children.
Oh and the book is illustrated by such a great artist! The images are so beautiful and telling for the stories and all of the stories end with a very beautiful two page image of something important of the story! I just loved it.
Let me know what you thought of this book!
If you have any requests for which book I should talk about next, please let me know in the comments down below.
For now, let books enrich your life!