I don’t remember exactly how I heard about Katherine Harbour’s Thorn Jack but I immediately added it to my TBR pile. It sounded right up my alley. Check it out:
Combining the sorcery of The Night Circus with the malefic suspense of A Secret History, Thorn Jack is a spectacular, modern retelling of the ancient Scottish ballad, Tam Lin–a beguiling fusion of love, fantasy, and myth that echoes the imaginative artistry of the works of Neil Gaiman, Cassandra Clare, and Melissa Marr.
In the wake of her older sister’s suicide, Finn Sullivan and her father move to a quaint town in upstate New York. Populated with socialites, hippies, and dramatic artists, every corner of this new place holds bright possibilities–and dark enigmas, including the devastatingly attractive Jack Fata, scion of one of the town’s most powerful families.
As she begins to settle in, Finn discovers that beneath its pretty, placid surface, the town and its denizens–especially the Fata family–wield an irresistible charm and dangerous power, a tempting and terrifying blend of good and evil, magic and mystery, that holds dangerous consequences for an innocent and curious girl like Finn.
To free herself and save her beloved Jack, Finn must confront the fearsome Fata family . . . a battle that will lead to shocking secrets about her sister’s death.
Yep. I want to read that! It put me in the mind of Holly Black’s Tithe or Maggie Stiefvater’s Lament (both of which I adore!) Of course I jumped at the chance to have Katherine Harbour stop by the blog and tell us a bit about Tam Lin and why she loves the story. Here’s what she had to say…
Tam Lin
Katherine Harbour
Why does ‘Tam Lin,’ an ancient Scottish ballad, translate so well to a contemporary story? In the original ballad, Janet the heroine is rebellious, defying anyone who warns her to avoid the ruin of Carter Hall—since it belonged to her family, she goes there anyway, and encounters a beautiful and dangerous young man with whom she has an antagonistic, flirty conversation. They eventually become lovers and she ends up pregnant. Her relationship with the mysterious Tam Lin soon has her risking her soul and her life to free him from the faery queen.
In Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, the story is set at a college in Minnesota, with the faery queen cleverly portrayed as a forbidding Classics professor named Medeous, and her court as a group of students (and some faculty members) who might be much older than they seem. In Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, the ballad is transported to contemporary England, where the heroine befriends a young Cellist she first meets as a child and saves him from a sinister, wealthy woman. In Maggie Stiefvater’s YA novel Lament, a modern-day girl releases a boy from a centuries’ old pact with a cruel faery queen disguised as a beautiful young woman. The story has even been placed in other time periods, such as Elizabethan England in Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard and Jane Nickerson’s Civil War version, The Mirk and Midnight Hour.
In Thorn Jack, I bring ‘Tam Lin’ to a college town in contemporary upstate New York. I love damaged characters, and so gave Jack a past as an exorcist in the Victorian era, before the Fatas caught him and essentially destroyed him. The faery queen is a beautiful girl from a wealthy, mysterious family (malevolent and ancient.) Finn, the hero, is a girl who has suffered the loss of her older sister. In all three books, my protagonist isn’t just fighting the faery folk—she’s battling death itself. I left out the pregnancy because I didn’t want Jack to be angling for a way to escape his fate, or for Finn to be desperate. In the ballad, Tam Lin’s motives are suspect—is he seducing Janet just to be free of the creatures who will sacrifice him on Hallowe’en?
The story at its roots remains the same, however; a good girl rescuing a bad boy from a wicked girl who will be the death of him, a story that resonates beautifully in any century.
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Thanks so much to Katherine for stopping by. Briar Queen, a companion to Thorn Jack came out on June 2nd. Here’s more about that one:
The dark, moody, and mystical fantasy begun in Thorn Jack, the first novel in the Night and Nothing series, continues in this bewitching follow up–an intriguing blend of Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alice in Wonderland, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream–in which Finn Sullivan discovers that her town, Fair Hollow, borders a dangerous otherworld . . .
Serafina Sullivan and her father left San Francisco to escape the painful memory of her older sister Lily Rose’s suicide. But soon after she arrived in bohemian Fair Hollow, New York, Finn discovered a terrifying secret connected to Lily Rose. The placid surface of this picture-perfect town concealed an eerie supernatural world–and at its center, the wealthy, beautiful, and terrifying Fata family.
Though the striking and mysterious Jack Fata tried to push Finn away to protect her, their attraction was too powerful to resist. To save him, Finn–a girl named for the angels and a brave Irish prince–banished a cabal of malevolent enemies to shadows, freeing him from their diabolical grip.
Now, the rhythm of life in Fair Hollow is beginning to feel a little closer to ordinary. But Finn knows better than to be lulled by this comfortable sense of normalcy. It’s just the calm before the storm. For soon, a chance encounter outside the magical Brambleberry Books will lead her down a rabbit hole, into a fairy world of secrets and legacies . . . straight towards the shocking truth about her sister’s death.
Lush and gorgeously written, featuring star-crossed lovers and the collision of the magical and the mundane, Briar Queen will appeal to the fans of Cassandra Clare’s bestselling Mortal Instruments series and Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely.
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