Published: April 18, 2023
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Series: A Hunger of Thorns #1
Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult
Pages: 432 (Hardcover)
My Rating: 3 Stars
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Synopsis:
Be swept away by a lush, witchy tale about forbidden magic and missing girls who don’t need handsome princes to rescue them. Perfect for fans of The Hazel Wood.
Maude is the daughter of witches. She spent her childhood running wild with her best friend, Odette, weaving stories of girls who slayed dragons and saved princes. Then Maude grew up and lost her magic–and her best friend.
These days, magic is toothless, reduced to glamour patches and psychic energy drinks found in supermarkets and shopping malls. Odette has always hungered for forbidden, dangerous magic, and two weeks ago she went searching for it. Now she’s missing, and everyone says she’s dead. Everyone except Maude.
Storytelling has always been Maude’s gift, so she knows all about girls who get lost in the woods. She’s sure she can find Odette inside the ruins of Sicklehurst, an abandoned power plant built over an ancient magical forest–a place nobody else seems to remember is there. The danger is, no one knows what remains inside Sicklehurst, either. And every good story is sure to have a monster.
I really like a dark and twisty fantasy story that really digs into the darker aspects of magic and A Hunger of Thorns very much satisfied that. This was a young adult fantasy, but I do think it was definitely geared toward the slightly older young adult crowd just based off some of the themes and graphic content. Like, this got pretty dang dark and I appreciated that aspect of it!
This is set in a world where magic is a known thing, but it’s been highly regulated and capitalized upon by corporations. Witches can only perform spells from an “approved” book, which as the characters point out, are mostly fluff rather than substance. Maude, the main character, had magic as a young girl but upon hitting puberty it fizzled out and this has kind of devastated her. Since this happened, her childhood best friend Odette has basically moved on to more interesting people, which has also devastated Maude. Odette has jumped headfirst into some delinquent behavior and has gone missing, so Maude sets off to find her because she’s pretty sure Odette went into an abandoned power plant called Sicklehurst which was built on top of a magical forest called Sticklegrass Wood. There are deadly beasts and deadlier secrets inside Sicklehurst and Maude bravely, but rather stupidly, runs right into the maw of the beast.
This book is as trippy as Alice in Wonderland and as twisted as a Grimm fairytale. It focuses on the magic of stories and how truly awful a fairytale can truly be when it hasn’t been romanticized. This is further emphasized by how awful Maude and Odette really are. They have a horribly toxic friendship – Odette craves power and attention and Maude is not so secretly pining after her like a lost puppy. Even when they were very young and spent nearly all their time together, they were just two unhappy girls using escapism to cope with their lives. And then there’s poor Rufus, who is pining after Maude but she treats him terribly because she’s still longing for a friendship that’s been over for years. I did like the pushback on the idea that “nice girls” were quiet and did what they were told, but it was such a small theme in the scope of things.
Overall, I can appreciate what this book was going for and the twisted whimsy of the Sticklegrass Wood. I did not care for Maude or Odette and watching them spiral was kind of a hot mess and both these kids needed some serious therapy thanks to all that childhood trauma. The book felt infinitely longer than the 432 pages it clocked in at, and I wish the pace had felt a bit snappier. A Hunger of Thorns is not a new favorite but it certainly wasn’t a bad story at all.
Powder & Page 