A dance with the fae will change everything

1919. In a highland village forgotten by the world, harvest season is over and the young who remain after war and flu have ravaged the village will soon head south to make something of themselves.

Moira Jean and her friends head to the forest for a last night of laughter before parting ways. Moira Jean is being left behind. She had plans to leave once – but her lover died in France and with him, her future. The friends light a fire, sing and dance. But with every twirl about the flames, strange new dancers thread between them, music streaming from the trees.

The fae are here.

Suddenly Moira Jean finds herself all alone, her friends spirited away. The iron medal of her lost love, pinned to her dress, protected her from magic.

For the Fae feel forgotten too. Lead by the darkly handsome Lord of the Fae, they are out to make themselves known once more. Moira Jean must enter into a bargain with the Lord to save her friends – and fast, for the longer one spends with the Fae, the less like themselves they are upon return. If Moira Jean cannot save her friends before Beltane, they will be lost forever…

Completely bewitching, threaded with Highland charm and sparkling with dark romance, this is a fairytale that will carry you away.

In The Thorns Remain, the boundary between a small Highlands community and the world of the Fae is breached one fateful night, with devastating consequences for all involved… and only one young woman with the ability to set things right.

It’s 1919, and the small town of Brudonnock is teetering on the brink of extinction. Too many young men have been lost to war or the flu pandemic; others of the younger population have left for new lives in Glasgow or Edinburgh or beyond. Those who remain work nonstop, sunup to sundown, to plow and harvest and keep their families fed, dreading the day when the estate owners will decide to turn them all out and force them from their cottages.

Moira Jean is our main character, a young woman mourning the loss of her true love Angus. Childhood sweethearts who grew up together and got engaged before he departed for war, they’d intended to marry as soon as he returned home, but despite surviving the war itself, he was killed by the flu before they were reunited. As the story opens, Moira Jean lives with her mother, the village healer, and works around the clock on the daily chores of village life, with Angus never far from her mind.

When the villagers learn that they’ve been given a reprieve from a feared eviction for one more year, Moira Jean and her friends decide to let loose for once and celebrate. They sneak off into the forest to drink, sing, and dance, but their dance is joined by strangers. Only Moira Jean, clutching Angus’s iron medal, can see that something is wrong and that these others aren’t actually people. When she wakes the next day, she discovers that her five friends are all gone — but no one else in Brudonnock realizes that they’re missing. For everyone but Moira Jean, false memories are firmly in place, and the missing friends are either traveling or away for work in the cities.

Moira Jean is scared and desperate, and returns to the forest to seek her friends. There, she finds the lord of the Land Under the Hill, whom she refers to as the Dreamer; a ruler of the Fae, who is both terrifying and mesmerizing. He seems fascinated by Moira Jean and her resistance to his glamours, and offers her a bargain: He’ll trade her for the return of her friends — but what he wants in exchange is difficult and costly, and there’s no guarantee that the people who come back will be in the same condition as when they left.

While the remote setting of Brudonnock gives old-timey vibes, it’s important to remember that the story is set in the years following the First World War. The village lacks electricity, running water, and other conveniences, but these do exist in the broader world. The effects of the war are evident on every page: The young men who still live in Brudonnock are all physically changed by the war or illness in some way, and too much of the village’s population has been brutally lost.

It’s no wonder, then, that the world of the Fae seems so enticing to those who have been taken.

‘It was wonderful,’ Callum said again, still breathless. ‘No one wanted for anything. Nothing hurt. There was no work. No war. There was only dancing and feasting and singing – oh, Moira Jean. It was everything I hoped the world would be.’

Even Moira Jean, who can see through the enchantments, can’t help but be tempted by a world that can be whatever she wishes — a place where she can be warm, and well-fed, free from back-breaking work and the constant fear of disease and injury.

At times, especially in the first half of the book, The Thorns Remain felt slow to me — but I think some of that is due to one of my pet peeves when it comes to book formatting. The Thorns Remain is divided into five parts, but within those parts, there are no chapters. Books without chapter breaks really frustrate me, especially because I typically read on a Kindle, and the chapter lengths help me track my progress. This isn’t an unusually long book, but the format makes it feel that way.

I will say that by the second half of the book, the storytelling pace picks up as the stakes get higher, the danger mounts, and Moira Jean’s situation becomes even more precarious. She’s forced to take risks for the sake of her community, even when the enchantment at play turns the village against her. Her strength and determination are remarkable, but she’s never made out to be some sort of superhero: She’s just a village girl who’s determined to do right by her family and friends, because they need her and she’s the only one who knows it.

I originally picked up a copy of The Thorns Remain on a whim after seeing it on a bookstore shelf. I hadn’t heard of it before, but the cover and the synopsis drew me in right away. I’ve had this book on my shelves for over a year now, and I’m so glad I took advantage of my holiday reading time to finally pick it up.

The Thorns Remain is a beautifully written blend of the fantastical and the day-to-day. Moira Jean is a terrific main character: She’s an ordinary person who’s thrust into an illogical, unreal reality, and chooses to take the difficult path of fighting for her friends rather than running away or giving into the lures of magic.

There’s an action-packed climax and an ending that’s just right. The Thorns Remain is both a fantasy story and a moving, introspective meditation on the horrors of war and its aftermath. It’s a thoughtful, descriptive, and emotional story, and it’s simply too good to miss!