Briarheart

By Mercedes Lackey

Book Overview

From beloved fantasy author Mercedes Lackey comes a fresh and feminist reinterpretation of Sleeping Beauty.​ Now in paperback!

Miriam may be the daughter of Queen Alethia of Tirendell, but she's not a princess. She's the child of Alethia and her previous husband, the King's Champion, who died fighting for the king, and she has no ambitions to rule. When her new baby sister Aurora, heir to the throne, is born, she's ecstatic. She adores the baby, who seems perfect in every way. But on the day of Aurora's christening, an uninvited Dark Fae arrives, prepared to curse her, and Miriam discovers she possesses impossible power.

Soon, Miriam is charged with being trained in both magic and combat to act as chief protector to her sister. But shadowy threats are moving closer and closer to their kingdom, and Miriam's dark power may not be enough to save everyone she loves, let alone herself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031610289X
• ISBN13: 9780316102896
• Release Date: October 2022
• Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 7.5"
• Age Range: 12 to 17 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 12

Customer Reviews

A bit anticlimactic, but I enjoyed the journey

This is a tricky book to review. I really enjoyed it while I was reading it and it’s done very well, but it kind of feels like either: this was written to be the first book of a long series, but then was wrapped up quickly and anticlimactically at the end to be a standalone, or the author had some points she wanted to make, but the story was really only a tool to make those points, like this was more of an essay using characters as mouthpieces than a story for its own sake. If this had been a first in a series, I probably would have given it 4.5 or 5 stars, but as a standalone it made me feel kind of weird.