Matthew's Journal

Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher. A telling of Sleeping Beauty that wonders if there was good reason for the sleeper to be enchanted thus. I enjoyed the narrative voice (and unusual choice of narrator), and the sense of the otherness of fairy; and the shape of the story and its twists.

Rose/House, Arkady Martine. A nice mash-up of locked-room, haunted house, and noir, even if a little too self-referential in calling out its own genre clichés. I loved the setting and the growing sense of menace, but what is going to keep it off the top spot for me is the ending, which felt a little too ill-defined. Rather like this week's Dr Who episode, if you're going to build up a great mystery, then just leaving the viewer/reader guessing at the end can feel very unsatisfactory.