the thorn and the blossom by theodora goss

What she has done now is refresh the genre, expanding its interests into territory explored by A.S. Goss is already one of the fantasy genre's leading voices, both as a storyteller (she won the World Fantasy Award in 2008 her collection In the Forest of Forgetting from Prime Books in 2006 is a casket of gems) and a scholar (her 2008 study for Aqueduct Press, Voices from Fairyland, should be a standard on syllabi for Victorian poetry). Best of all, Goss leaves some things unexplained, and ends on a note of musing rather than finality. Deeper still, Goss updates the dangers of passions that seem to cross decades and centuries, the chill hazards of romance on the thresholds of death-summoning here a sensibility found in the work of Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Mew. Goss conjures not only a modern-day love story but the spirit of 19th-century fascination with an idealized medieval world, the world envisioned by Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. Goss-a professor of literature at Boston University-re-imagines in an original way the tale of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, evoking more generally Arthurian legend as glossed by Tennyson and John William Waterhouse (she refers explicitly to Waterhouse's famous 1888 painting The Lady of Shalott). Their love reignites ('For the first time that she remembered, the world felt right, as it should be.') but then Evelyn learns of Brendan's secret. A decade passes before they meet again, fate (?) throwing them together in the English Department of a small college in Virginia.

Brendan and Evelyn meet cute in a bookshop in Cornwall, but their first kiss ends with Evelyn fleeing from a vision she has of Brendan transforming into the Green Man. The Thorn and The Blossom by Theodora Goss (2012 by Quirk Books, with illustrations by Scott McKowen) is a delightful love story, a tale of missed chances and mutual misunderstandings, woven around a thousand-year-old curse by a jealous witch.

The thorn and the blossom by theodora goss