Interview: Helena Rookwood and Elm Vince (An Enchantment of Thorns)

Today, I get to bring you all something special: an interview with An Enchantment of Thorns co-authors Helena Rookwood (The Thief and the Throne) and Elm Vince (Tapestry of Night).

This interview was conducted via email with the Scotland-based authors. True to form, they’ve even written many of their answers together!

An Interview with Helena Rookwood & Elm Vince, authors of An Enchantment of Thorns

First of all, congratulations on your new series! How does it feel to be writing together again?

Helena Rookwood and Elm Vince: It feels GREAT. We had such a fun time writing Desert Nights, and working together on a new project has been a dream. We haven’t been able to see each other as much as we usually would with the pandemic, so having this joint project has been a nice excuse for (almost daily) regular catch-ups online!

You’re both long-time friends who ended up as writers. How long have you known each other?

Helena & Elm: Too long *cackles.*

Literally our whole lives—we have photos of us as babies together. Our families are friends and we went to school together, then we ended up both moving to Scotland around the same time.

We’ve always had the same reading tastes, and have run a few creative projects together in the past, so moving onto writing together seemed like the natural next step!

Your first collaboration was the Desert Nights series, a retelling of Arabian Nights. Did both of you want to tackle Beauty and the Beast next, or were there other contenders?

Helena & Elm: We’d spoken about a Beauty and the Beast retelling before we’d even finished Desert Nights. We plan to cover other fairy tales in this new series, but we already had the kernel of an idea for a Beauty and the Beast retelling—and it’s one of the most popular fairy tales for a reason!

So what convinced you individually that Beauty and the Beast was the right story to work on together?

Helena: Aladdin was always Elm’s favorite fairy tale and Beauty and the Beast is mine, so I was really excited to move onto this one next. I’ve been wanting to write a Beauty and the Beast retelling for a really long time, and it’s a fairy tale I can’t read enough versions of, so I’ve loved working on this one.

Elm: When I think of these two fairy tales, I can’t help but think of the Disney movies, which were such a huge part of my childhood. Aladdin was my favorite, with Beauty and the Beast a close second. I was always drawn to the dark-haired, strong-willed princesses!

Right from the beginning of chapter one, Rosehill and the Folkwood felt fully fleshed out, and the Cursed Court was its own unique world. How did you develop these settings as a team?

Helena & Elm: The setting was the thing we’d discussed before we’d finished writing Desert Nights—we both had this really clear picture of an enchanted forest and a woodland court. Luckily, we’re usually on the same page with these things because we tend to read the same books!

At the start of a new series, the worldbuilding happens quite organically with us having open-ended conversations, “What if…” or “How about this…”, with one of us (Helena) scribing, until we land on something we’re both excited about writing.

Partway through plotting An Enchantment of Thorns we did have a sudden panic that maybe we were picturing something quite different, so independently drew out how we imagined the Folkwood and the Cursed Court to double-check. We had almost identical drawings!

In the best-known versions of Beauty and the Beast, Belle starts out as a kind and dutiful daughter and not much more. But Aster, her counterpart in An Enchantment of Thorns, has a life of her own, from an ex-lover to a full-time job. How important was it to give Aster her own life and profession?

Enchantment of Thorns cover
An Enchantment of Thorns is the first book in a new series by indie authors Rookwood and Vince.

Helena & Elm: Part of what draws both of us to the Beauty character is that she’s a dreamer; in the original fairy tale, when her father promises to bring her and her sisters gifts, her sisters ask for dresses and jewelry while Beauty asks for a single rose. In that version, and a lot of the retellings, she’s also often quite an alternative character—she doesn’t always fit in—and that was something that appealed to us both, too.

In terms of how we made the character our own, the books we love to read are those with strong female leads. We also knew we wanted to make something more of the roses, which is how Aster ended up as a greenwitch. We wanted her to be kind like the Beauty in the original tale, but also talented and driven, so she could hold her own in a world ruled by fae.

Thorne is a really interesting Beast. I loved that he was humane and fair, yet you weren’t afraid to have him outright annoy Aster and have his bad moods, too. What are your favorite things about Thorne?

Helena & Elm: Thorne has a lot to learn from Aster. When we meet him, he’s kind of given up hope that the curse will ever be broken, but he hides that with this detached, often insolent, persona. The more you find out about his backstory, the more you realize there’s a lot of depth to him and why he acts the way he does.

He’s spent a lot of time wallowing in self-hatred, but Aster brings him back to himself. We like how they challenge each other, but in a good way.

As you were developing An Enchantment of Thorns, did Thorne always walk the line between dangerous and misjudged, or did he skew more in one direction more than the other? 

Helena & Elm: We actually had quite a tough time with Thorne, exactly for the reason you stated. We knew we wanted to make sure he was really fae—and for that to mean he would act in a way that wasn’t always human, not just for him to be really powerful or beautiful—but we also wanted to make sure he wasn’t totally unlikeable.

In the beginning, he probably skewed too far in the direction of being dangerous, so we ended up adding in sections to make his character feel a bit warmer during the editing process.

Helena, you’re two books in to the Carnival of Fae series (The Prince and the Poisoner and The Thief and the Throne), and Elm, you have the Star Cast series (Tapestry of Night), which provides another take on the fae. So clearly you’re both drawn to stories involving fae! What is it about fae that inspires you both?

Elm: I think for me, it’s the creative range. You can have these monstrous kinds of creepy folk that you see in, say, Holly Black’s writing, or the beautiful, almost elf-like High Fae in Sarah J Maas’s worlds. We wanted to include both in our world and explore different types of faeries.

Helena: I love anything involving fairy tales and folklore, so fae books are a natural way for me to explore those interests in my writing. Weaving mythology and plant lore into my books are two of the things I enjoy most, and I find them a big source of inspiration.

The Carnival of Fae and Star Cast series each point to future encounters with fae characters, but haven’t introduced any yet. They share a concept of fae being separated from humans. But in An Enchantment of Thorns, Aster and Laurel have direct encounters with fae from the beginning. How different was it to write a story where fae and humans are neighbors?

In both of our previous series, those worlds had been shaped by past interactions with the fae. That made our world in An Enchantment of Thorns very different to write as we were setting up the fae world and the human world at the same time, so had to give both equal weight!

Both of us enjoyed writing a world where the fae were present from the outset—so you might see more of that from us both in the future.

What’s next for each of you?

Helena: As well as continuing to work on the sequels to An Enchantment of Thorns, I’m also currently reworking an old series that will be re-released under the series title Faerie Awakens later this year. It was the first series in the genre I wrote, and I (shamefully) never got around to writing the sixth and final book, so readers have been waiting a long time for me to get back to this one! Having left it for such a long time, I’ve struggled not to see all the things I’d do differently, so it’s turned into a larger rewriting project than I imagined it would be.

Elm: I’m working on Herald of Fire, the second book in my Star Cast series. I’m also excited to continue with the A Court of Fairy Tales series this year. We have two more books planned following Aster, before moving onto other fairy tales featuring her sisters. The second book, A Trial of Thorns, is already written, so readers won’t have to wait too long to continue Aster’s journey with us!

Thank you for joining me today. I’d like to wrap up with a fun question and a bit of a challenge. Please complete the following sentence individually:

And they lived happily ever after…until the next book, where we throw more drama their way!

(I know you said to write this individually, and we did, but we’d basically written the same thing. That’s how in sync we are!)

An Enchantment of Thorns is available for pre-order, and will be released on May 6, 2021 . To read my ARC review, click here.

Helena Rookwood writes romantic fantasy. She is the author of the Carnival of Fae series, the River Witch series, and co-author of the Desert Nights series with Elm Vince. For more on the author, visit helenarookwood.com.

Elm Vince writes YA fantasy. She is the author of the Star Cast series and co-author of the Desert Nights series with Helena Rookwood. For more on the author, visit elmvince.com.

Review: An Enchantment of Thorns (Rookwood & Vince)

Today’s Indie Book Spotlight lands on a retelling of one of my very favorite tales…

An Enchantment of Thorns Review

Note: I received a free advanced review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Holy mackerel! I love this book.

In all seriousness, this retelling of Beauty and the Beast was everything I could have asked for. For one thing, the magic has been upgraded more than a few levels. The royals of An Enchantment of Thorns are not just people born into the ruling class, but long-limbed, terrifying and impossibly graceful fae who belong to multiple courts throughout the land. But there’s more than one kind of fae in this world, and it’s hard to say which is more dangerous.

Narrator Aster is most familiar with the fae of the Folkwood, which surrounds her home in Rosehill. The Folkwood is a dangerous place, full of wicked tricksters (the small folk) and deadly ones, like the puca who’s been stalking Aster since the day it took her mentor, Sage. There’s also the beast, a fae creature seen once a year at the Tithe (more on the that in a minute).

Enchantment of Thorns cover
This is the second series for co-authors Rookwood and Vince

Haunted by Sage’s death and burdened with replacing her as Rosehill’s only greenwitch, heroine Aster lives her life bottled up, geographically and emotionally. She’s as comfortable in a fight, thanks to her father’s training, as she is nurturing both plants and humans, often doing both in the same day. But she’s not as empowered as she seems. When the local farmers ignore her orders, or when servants in her wealthy half-sister’s household murmur each time Aster visits, there’s nothing Aster can do but suck it up. As her butt-kicking older sister Laurel puts it, Aster isn’t exactly living a complete life.

Roses with thorns

The characters in An Enchantment of Thorns are complex and unique. To break the curse, Aster must drop her prejudices against fae; after 99 years of cursed life, Throne must learn to let go of his. But are the fae to be trusted?

“To Rosehill, you have to be the calm and collected greenwitch who keeps her head in emergencies,” Laurel says, “but I know you, Aster…I know how much you feel.” Those emotions will be the key to Aster’s future and developing her particular human craft. They’re also what lands her at the beast’s Cursed Court, via the annual Tithe.

Once a year, every girl of a certain age must step onto a pathway that forms in the Folkwood. One girl will be chosen, and never seen again; the rest return shaken and almost unable to describe the terrible and beautiful fae lord they’ve just seen. If the people of Rosehill try to resist the Tithe—if even one girl fails to appear—the Folkwood closes in on all the girls, and no one survives. Yet the girls presented at the Tithe are meant to look “pretty and innocent,” with a requisite crown of flowers in their hair. As Aster describes it, “this was not a day for beauty. This was a day for iron and steeled nerves.”

When Aster’s silly half-sister Ava and her friends read one too many fairy tales and want to be chosen, Aster, who is also of age for the Tithe, must intervene. No surprise—though she appears ragged and wearing thorns instead of pretty blooms—the beast picks Aster instead.

It’s hard not to picture the temperamental Disney beast at times, but this one, who goes by Thorne, is more beast after the curse is broken than before (albeit with a really good head of hair). His house is more woodland than palace. Thorne has servants, of course, but they are lesser fae, and include the adorable Mosswhistle, a brownie Aster lures into her service after a few days of torment by the little folk.

And they do torment her: invisible at first, they leave out a beautiful dress full of pins, snatch the heat from a steaming bath the moment she sets foot in it, and never grow tired of laughing at and mocking her. There’s no “be our guest,” sung or stated, in An Enchantment of Thorns.

Aster is an interesting character who makes a great vehicle for the reader; she falls in love slowly and unexpectedly enough that it never feels forced. What makes her interesting is never forced, either: Aster is a young woman with many responsibilities and very few choices. She’s found her calling with plants, but her days aren’t exactly her own.

Aster is young, and lacks the respect Sage had though she must do the same work. Even supportive big sister Laurel, a fighter working for their smuggler father, doesn’t realize just how much there is to Aster. “The Beast should beware if he chooses you at the Tithe this week, what with your arsenal of plants,” she quips. (But also note: at least half of my highlights in this book were Laurel’s lines.)

It’s wonderful to see Astrid gradually become empowered. Best of all, she becomes empowered before she’s swept away by her heart. In this retelling, it isn’t all about falling in love to break a curse.

Dark fairytales

The dullahan makes a chilling appearance in An Enchantment of Thorns, along with barghests and too many pixies, brownies and goblins to count.

There’s so much depth to Thorne’s “beast” character, too, from his sarcasm, goading and irritatingly (for Aster) indirect encouragement, to the despair driving his weather-changing bad moods. He’s neither beastly nor overly handsome, like in some romantic fantasies. Says Aster, “His wild beauty was like a knife to the gut.”

Interestingly, Thorne also takes on the role of mentor. Unlike the selfish beast most of us know from Disney, Throne never appears truly uncaring. He doesn’t appear at her door the first night to try to force her to dinner; he only expects it as a courtesy to a seriously down-on-his-luck Court Fae, and because the other Tithe girls always managed it. He doesn’t forbid her food if she doesn’t eat with him, either. Moody, complicated, humane and ultimately lovable, he’s a beast any smart gal could fall in love with.

Fans of dark fantasy will feel at home reading An Enchantment of Thorns, thanks to the nightmarish curse and the monstrous fae in the Folkwood; there are some truly chilling settings and scenes thanks to both. Fantastical ones, too. But romantics will also love it. And if you’re like me, you will deeply regret not having the next book to read immediately after finishing it.

An Enchantment of Thorns is currently available for pre-order, and will be released on May 6, 2021. To learn more about these indie authors, visit their websites at helenarookwood.com and elmvince.com.