The Short Version
- Read by: Sophie Hunter Scott is the sole narrator across alternating first-person chapters, tasked with keeping Rosemary and Carabosse distinct without dialogue tags to lean on.
- At its heart: forbidden reunion, guilt and self-imposed distance, a kingdom worth overthrowing for love
- Vibe: Yearning and a little dark, fairy tale trappings carrying real emotional stakes
- Short version: A dual-POV fantasy romance worth a look if the wife-and-wife separation premise appeals to you, though it is early enough that you are largely trusting the synopsis over other listeners.
Of Thorns and Wings tells its story from two perspectives locked on opposite sides of a spell, Rosemary, trapped in a dreamless sleep inside the King's City, and Carabosse, the wraith she loves and cannot reach. This audiobook is a dual-POV fantasy romance built around Lollishire's monarchy, a forest called the Hartwood that will not stop calling to Rosemary, and a twenty-year-old mistake that still stands between Carabosse and the one thing she wants most.
Rosemary's Politics, Carabosse's Guilt, One Relationship
Darva Green splits the book cleanly down the middle: Rosemary's chapters carry the political plot, a strange alliance with the very enemies who locked her away, aimed at overthrowing Lollishire's monarchy and restoring the peace that the greedy kings and manipulative queens of the synopsis have apparently spent years dismantling, while Carabosse's chapters carry the guilt plot, a single mistake made twenty years earlier that still keeps her from claiming the mate she has already come close to losing once. Both halves point at the same relationship from opposite emotional angles, Rosemary reaching toward the Hartwood and toward Carabosse at once, Carabosse holding herself back even as she senses her wife slipping further from her reach.
A mature-content note comes attached to the synopsis, and the stakes described, a dreamless sleep, manipulative queens, forces stronger than greedy kings, a wraith losing herself to darkness, suggest a book leaning into the darker end of fantasy romance rather than its lighter, court-intrigue-only register. Readers who want fairy-tale trappings, kings, queens, forests, wraiths, played with real weight rather than treated as decoration should find plenty to work with here, and the promise to defy the Goddesses themselves gives the central romance a mythic scale to match its emotional one.
The title itself points at the book's central image, thorns for the danger and pain running through both women's histories, wings for whatever it is that lets Carabosse move as a wraith between the waking world and wherever Rosemary is trapped. Green does not explain every piece of the mythology in the synopsis, the exact nature of a wraith, what the twenty-year mistake actually was, is left for the audiobook itself to unpack, which is a reasonable choice for a story clearly building toward revelations rather than front-loading its worldbuilding. Even the King's City and the Hartwood are introduced as places the listener already half-knows, dropped into the middle of a world with its own history rather than explained from the ground up.
Scott Alone Must Voice Two First-Person 'I's
Sophie Hunter Scott is the only credited narrator for a book written in alternating first-person chapters, Rosemary's voice and Carabosse's voice trading the story back and forth without a third-person frame to lean on. That structure puts real weight on a single narrator's ability to make two first-person I characters sound distinct from each other, since the text itself will not do that work through dialogue tags or narration cues the way a close-third novel would. Rosemary's sections lean on longing and urgency, a woman locked away and losing hope by the hour, while Carabosse's sections carry more weight and self-recrimination, a character living with the consequences of one bad choice made two decades earlier. Distinguishing those two emotional registers, not just two names, is the real job description here.
No reviews are visible yet on this listing to confirm how that challenge plays out in practice; Of Thorns and Wings released in March of 2026, and the single rating on file, a perfect 5, has no written text attached to it. Listeners going in now are working from the synopsis and the strength of the premise rather than a chorus of other opinions, which is simply where a brand-new release stands before the reviews have had time to catch up.
MP3 CD Leftovers, but a Real Nine-Hour Runtime
MP3 CD Format is the phrase that opens the synopsis on this listing, right before Rosemary's first line, a leftover header from how the listing catalogs a physical disc edition rather than the digital audiobook most listeners will actually be streaming or downloading. The page count attached to the listing reads 1, which cannot reflect an actual book and is almost certainly a data artifact from however this title's print or CD metadata was entered into the system. Neither detail affects what you will actually hear, a 9-hour-and-27-minute dual-POV fantasy romance, but both are worth knowing about so you are not thrown off if you notice them while browsing the listing yourself.
Print-edition metadata also shows up in the ISBN and publisher fields on this listing, sitting alongside the audio details, which is common enough on newer titles where the audiobook, ebook, and print editions all funnel into the same product record. Treat the audio-specific facts, the 9-hour-and-27-minute runtime, the narrator credit, as the reliable ones, and the leftover print fields as background noise rather than anything wrong with your purchase. Blackstone Publishing carries the release, priced at $20.29, in line with a standard full-length audiobook rather than a shorter novella-scale release.
Fans of Wife-and-Wife Reunions Get Real Plot Weight
This is a fit for listeners who want their fantasy romance with real plot weight on both sides, a political rebellion for one point-of-view character and twenty years of guilt for the other, rather than a story that treats its fantasy setting as pure backdrop. Fans of wife-and-wife pairings built around separation and reunion, a dreamless sleep on one side, self-imposed distance on the other, are the clearest audience here, especially listeners who like their happily-ever-afters to be fought for against both political and personal obstacles rather than handed over easily, and nothing in the listing points to a series, so it should work as a complete arc in its own right. The mature-content note is worth factoring into that decision too, since it signals a book willing to sit in darker territory, darkness Carabosse is described as losing herself to, rather than keeping its fairy-tale elements strictly whimsical.
This one currently asks for a certain amount of trust in the premise, the Hartwood, the Goddesses, and the wife Rosemary is determined to win back, since only a single rating and no written reviews sit on file before the rest of the audience weighs in. Listeners who would rather wait for more feedback before committing over 9 hours to a brand-new release have a fair reason to hold off. That trust may well pay off regardless, the setup is a genuinely strong one, but it is worth knowing before you press play.
