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The Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean

Each generation, a competition is held to find the next empress of Honoku. The rules are simple. Survive the palace's enchanted seasonal rooms. Conquer Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Marry the prince. All are eligible to compete--all except yokai, supernatural monsters and spirits whom the human emperor is determined to enslave and destroy. Mari has spent a lifetime training to become empress. Winning should be easy. And it would be, if she weren't hiding a dangerous secret. Mari is a yokai with the ability to transform into a terrifying monster. If discovered, her life will be forfeit. As she struggles to keep her true identity hidden, Mari's fate collides with that of Taro, the prince who has no desire to inherit the imperial throne, and Akira, a half-human, half-yokai outcast. Torn between duty and love, loyalty and betrayal, vengeance and forgiveness, the choices of Mari, Taro, and Akira will decide the fate of Honoku in this beautifully written, edge-of-your-seat YA...
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Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

There's a princess trapped in a tower. This isn't her story.

Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?

If only.

Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He's heard there's a curse here that needs breaking, but it's a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold...

COVER ART: Trevillion Images and Shutterstock
PUBLISHER: Tor Books
YEAR: 2023
LENGTH: 116 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: No

Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

THORNHEDGE is a Sleeping Beauty retelling which recasts the sleeper as someone best never woken: a faerie changeling whose confusion at the human world and disregard for other lives turns her into someone who can only be contained in sleep or stopped forever in death. The sleeper is constrained and contained by Toadling, the once-human girl who was stolen from her cradle and replaced by that very same changeling.

I like this as a take on Sleeping Beauty, but it plays the idea of changelings straight, not engaging with the historical links between “changeling” children and autism (or other ways of being ostracized for being strange). In that light, featuring a child so unable to learn social rules that she must be kept or killed becomes a more fraught narrative, one that makes the story harder to enjoy. I like Toadling and Halim, but because of how the backstory is told first as memories then as stories to Halim, I remain unsure just how much Toadling told him of what had happened. I appreciate Halim as an idea of a character, but as a novella there wasn’t really room to flesh out that many significant characters and Toadling received most of the detail (to Halim’s detriment). The time dilation between the human world and Faerie allows for a couple of cool narrative moments. Ultimately this is a book I would neither recommend nor dissuade someone from reading. 

Graphic/Explicit CW for confinement.

Moderate CW for blood, violence, injury detail, abandonment, murder, animal cruelty, child death, death.

Minor CW for cursing, pregnancy, kidnapping, plague, self harm, suicide, torture, parental death.

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A large thorn with a bright red drop of blood at the tip, with a castle in the distance. "Not all curses should be broken."


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