The Thorns Remain Age Group: Adult
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: 1990s, Historical Fantasy, Historical Mystery, Bisexual Characters, Gay Characters, Mental Health Representation, Non-Binary Characters, Queer Characters, Scottish Characters, British Authors, Dark Fantasy, Fae/Fey, Faerie, Scotland, Mental Health, Physical Disabilities, Trauma, Vision impairment, Scottish, Various Magic
My Rating:
Published on: 16th February 2023
Pages: 416
Disability Representation: Foot Injury, Mental Health, Missing Eye, Mobility aid, Pandemic, Polio, War Injuries
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A dance with the fae will change everything

1919. In a Highland village forgotten by the world, the young people who remain after war and flu will soon head south to make something of themselves.

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

The Fae have joined the dance.

Suddenly Moira Jean finds herself all alone, her friends spirited away.

For the Fae feel left behind and forgotten too. Led 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 they spend with the Fae, the less like themselves they will be upon return. If Moira Jean cannot save her friends before Beltane, they will be lost forever...

Bewitching, threaded with Highland charm, and sparkling with romance, this fairy tale will carry you away.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

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I’ve always got my eye out for books set in Scotland, and with fae thrown into the mix, The Thorns Remain by JJA Harwood looked interesting. I wasn’t quite sure if it was going to lean more towards historical fiction or fantasy. Keep reading to see how I found it.

It’s the year 1919, and Moira Jean and her friends are helping their village prepare the land for harvest, praying that it will be a good one that will see them all through the winter. Preparing land that could be taken from them at any moment if the landowners decide to sell it or do something else with it. In the year following the end of the First World War, everyone is struggling. The Spanish Influenza has run rampant throughout the world, adding more suffering and taking lives that had been spared in the war.

Life doesn’t just feel unfair for Moira Jean; it feels lifeless, her dreams shattered, her future empty, null and void. The chance to party in the woods with some stolen alcohol with her friends is a brief, blissful escape from the toll of everyday life and her painful memories. One night, something joins them when they dance, a powerful force that brings with it new dancers that don’t look quite right in the flickering flames. Moira Jean isn’t quite sure what she’s seeing, and she’s drunk a lot by that point, so she thinks nothing of it.

Until she wakes up the next day, and her friends are gone. They’ve been gone for months, off to other cities to work, and no one believes her when she says they were here yesterday helping with the harvest.

Embarking on a quest to find her friends, Moira Jean finds herself entering a bargain with a powerful fae. The creatures of myth and legend are real, it seems, and her only ally is the strange woman in the village that everyone avoids. With her help, Moira starts to learn about the fae while trying to keep up with the work around the village, as her community feels the loss of those they don’t even remember being there.

The Thorns Remain quite rightly should be a very dull book because Moira Jean’s life is dull. It’s the dreary life of a young woman in 1919. If you’re expecting pretty dresses and balls, then this isn’t the book for you. What stops it from being monotonous is Harwood’s writing. From the first few scenes, I was captivated by Moira Jean and village life. This is helped by the fact that the book starts with a flash forward, and then we get the full story. As we go through each scene, we’re waiting for the story to catch up, to see how we get to the part we’ve already been given a glimpse of.

While Moira Jean works to get her friends back, her actions do not go unnoticed by some members of the village. Completely unaware of what is happening, they become suspicious of Moira Jean, going as far as to accuse her of crimes and question her sanity even as she’s doing everything to help them. The way Harwood interweaves the fae with village life only emphasises the harsh reality of it and just how tempting it would be to give in and accept what they’re offering.

Harwood deals with a lot of hard-hitting subjects in The Thorns Remain, such as grief, mental health and disabilities. One of Moira Jean’s friends returned from the war with the loss of one eye, and another has an injured foot as a result of polio and uses a crutch to walk. By setting her novel in the period of the Spanish flu, Harwood can explore all the feelings surrounding a pandemic without encroaching on too recent feelings related to COVID-19. The backdrop of a wee highland village cut off from the world is both miles away from and yet similar enough to what we all felt during the lockdown that the reader can connect with the villagers while keeping a safe distance emotionally. As a result, The Thorns Remain is a multi-layered, emotionally charged novel.

I wasn’t sure how this one would turn out, and it ended up being an enjoyable read with interesting characters. It is quite a slow read, though, which I personally didn’t find to be a bad thing. There was plenty happening to keep me engaged, to keep me interested in where the story was going. I’ve seen a review list the diversity of this book as low, and I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion. If you’re viewing diversity only in terms of race, then yes, diversity is not just low, it’s non-existent. However, the book is set in a small and out-of-the-way village in the Scottish Highlands, with emphasis on small and out of the way. With that in mind, the lack of racial diversity is historically accurate. There is a lot of disability representation, as mentioned, and there is also LGBTQIA+ representation (gay, lesbian, bisexual and gender-fluid).

The result is a well-rounded novel. Harwood’s take on the fae has lots of connections to Scottish folklore, and this, combined with the historical Scottish setting, makes The Thorns Remain a fabulously unique read.

Thanks for reading my review for The Thorns Remain by J. J. A. Harwood!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of my reviews if you’re looking for some more book recommendations 🙂 You can also now sign up for my newsletter to get an email each month with a list of my new reviews!

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