Alex Brown Reviews The Severed Thread by Leslie Vedder
The Severed Thread, Leslie Vedder (Razorbill 978-0-59332-585-8, $19.99. 416pp, hc) February 2023.
Vedder’s young-adult second world fantasy novel The Severed Thread marks the return to the ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’ and ‘‘Sleeping Beauty’’-inspired world she established in last year’s The Bone Spindle. In the first book, we meet our protagonists: Shane the huntsman, Fi the treasure hunter, Red the girl with dark secrets, and Briar Rose the cursed prince. Fi pricks her finger on a bone spindle and unexpectedly binds herself to the spirit of the sleeping prince. She and Shane must escape Witch Hunters, a bloodthirsty gang of warlords who kill anyone with magic they can get their hands on, and the Spindle Witch, the villain who tried to destroy the kingdom of Andar.
Although Fi and Shane are able to successfully break Briar’s sleeping curse, their troubles aren’t yet over. Red is revealed to be working for the Spindle Witch (although how willingly is anyone’s guess, including Red’s). Shane’s attraction to Red might be romantic in better circumstances, but following her heart now could lead to her doom. Fi can no longer keep her own cursea secret, and the way her friends find out about it has devastating consequences. Briar is desperate to learn how to use his magic to save his people, but unless he can learn to control it, he may just end up a weapon of the Spindle Witch.
The teens’ search for the key to a code left by Briar’s sister, a code that can help them stop the Spindle Witch once and for all, takes them into ancient caves, a hidden city, the wild countryside, and a tower of death and destruction. Book two, like book one, has an ending that is both thrilling in terms of the cliffhanger and unsatisfying in terms of resolution. But if nothing else, it sets up what looks like will be a great book three: The Cursed Rose.
I have never played Dungeons & Dragons (I know, I know), but I have just seen the new movie with Chris Pine, and the Bone Spindle series has a lot in common with what I imagine fantasy role-playing games are like. You have your group of friends, each with a different yet important skillset, who are on a quest. Along the way, they must collect various magical objects, solve various puzzles, or defeat various mini-bosses. The pace moves quickly and the action is intense. Vedder relies heavily on tropes, but does it in such a way that it’s actually pretty fun. She’s not deconstructing, twisting, or remixing tropes. Instead, she demonstrates that she thoroughly understands when and how to use them to get the greatest narrative impact.
While The Bone Spindle featured first-person POVs for just Fi and Shane, The Severed Thread adds Red and Briar to the mix. Having four POVs can be a recipe for disaster, but Vedder keeps it manageable. Readers will probably have a character they prefer more than the others (mine was badass warrior Shane) and a POV they would like to spend less time with (mine was Red, whose POV I’m still not convinced was necessary), but at least the story is never dull.
Despite the fun, there are some rather glaring issues. I wish the series was more diverse. We have a sapphic romance between Red and Shane, but I was vastly less interested in the het romance between Fi and Briar. I would’ve liked to see more diversity in terms of race, gender, and sexual and romantic attractions. The sequel also functions less like its own novel and more like place-setting for the third book. This feels like one of those situations where this probablycould have been a solid duology but was padded out into a trilogy. While I do recommend reading The Severed Thread, I’m glad I read it back-to-back with The Bone Spindle instead of on its own. The goal is to get the characters to specific physical and emotional locations in prep for the grand finale. As such, there’s not much of a narrative arc independent of the series.
Although it’s not easy judging a series when you only have two books of a planned trilogy, if The Severed Thread proves anything, it’s that Vedder knows exactly what she’s doing with fantasy tropes. Briar and Red could do worse than having friends like Fi and Shane. This quartet is about to face the hardest battle of their lives, but at least they have each other.
Alex Brown is a librarian, author, historian, and Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, young adult fiction, librarianship, and Black history.
This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.
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