The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo | Rating: ★★★★★“You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled—not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did.”
Okay. You should know something about me, first: I love fairytales.With all my heart. There's nothing like a good tale that gets the blood flowing, right? The problem with collections of fairytales that are tied into novels is, that a lot of the time they just aren't good. At first, despite how much I adore Bardugo's writing, I was skeptical of The Language of Thorns. I haven't had luck with many of these sorts of short stories, save Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling. So, naturally, I had my expectations quite low.
Within the first story, I was captivated and compelled to read more. For a time, I felt as though these were fairytales of a different age. Bardugo has her signature all over it--from settings, to prose. But it feels classic already. Completely and beautifully a world of its own. What strikes me about the way it is written is that you certainly feel as if someone is reading the stories out loud to you, huddled near a fire in the dead of winter. The Language of Thorns embraces you and ties you into that feeling of nostalgia and unease that comes with all the classic fairytales we knew as children.
