Review by Frank Plowright

Briar is a telling of Briar Rose’s life differing greatly from the Sleeping Beauty fairytale. In this version a prince turns up, but she’s betrayed by her family and left sleeping on a lonely plinth for a century. When awakened by chance it’s in a greatly changed world with all certainties gone, the most obvious of which is her no longer being a princess.

Given the vastly different world Briar now exists in, for a fair while there seems little point in Christopher Cantwell tying her into the previous fairytale. However, beyond being well versed in what’s now considered ancient lore saving her life on occasion, there is a reason for choosing her. Someone who’s been asleep for a century really fears sleep, and under Germán García she makes for a more attractive main character than Rip van Winkle, yet there’s an even better reason why she’s central. It turns out to be a clever plot, faithful to the fairytale, yet extrapolating from it.

At the start García’s art seems slim and wispy, but that’s just the way he draws the fairytale world and there’s a relatively quick departure from there. What Briar has become before revival is an impressively distressed location, and the longer the story continues the more precise and decorative his art becomes. He’s adaptable as well, and different moods prompt different styles, with ornate flashbacks a speciality.

Cantwell’s dialogue is well prepared as a mixture of inventive invective that matches a world pretty disgusting in so many respects, and the gnomes are particularly coarse, nothing you’d want around your garden for sure. This is just the first part of Briar’s story, but during the course of a constantly diverting adventure she’s learned just who’s got it in for her and why she was left sleeping for so long. By the end she has three allies and a certain mission to take her into Quest of the Cursed. Good.