"Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower" review

Overview

Title: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Author: Tamsyn Muir

Subgenre: Fairy tale

2021 Bingo squares: Trans or nonbinary character, Witches

Recommend:

Stars: 5/5

Review

Fairy tale meets dungeon crawl meets queer romance in this bizarrely adorable novella by Tamsyn Muir. The witch wants to make art, and so she locks Princess Floralinda up at the top of a tower with forty flights. She does it all quite properly, with one challenge per flight, and any prince that wants to rescue Floralinda must face all forty challenges. Unfortunately, even the first challenge is too difficult for every prince who attempts it, and Floralinda remains unrescued.

He did not come out. I shall go out the window. Remember me to my parents as their loving Princess Mellarose, good-bye.

Upon discovering a quite concerning diary, Floralinda decides to take matters into her own hands and attempt to escape the tower.

The white she mourned as she liked white bread better, but she knew vaguely that wheaten was more wholesome, with nutritious parts like the angiosperm.

This task would seem insurmountable for a princess, but the fairy Cobweb shows up in a storm, and together they take on the tower’s obstacles.

“When I get back I will find a particular tree that has been rude to me, and shake some of this all over its roots, and pretend I am watering it when I am really reconstituting the mixture; then I will set it alight from a distance, and no matter what the forest fairies try to do it will burn like anything, and be much too sticky to scrape off. Then they might ask me (I will be feigning tears, as hadn’t I just been watering the blasted thing?) and I will say, ‘Oh dear, if only you knew anything about metastable emulsions’, and they’ll all be sorry.”

Cobweb is an experimentalist who likes to set things on fire, and Floralinda is a princess, and they are wonderful foils for each other. There is gender commentary, queer romance, gorgeous prose, and quite a bit of monster slaying in an almost progression-fantasy-like manner. It’s a lovely novella, and I recommend it unconditionally.