"Thornrose Estate" by Kendra E. Ardnek

This book is a whirlwind!  An amnesiac heroine (who repeatedly forgets things in the past), a shape-shifting hero, a horrible curse to untangle, and a friends-to-lovers arc that I loved.  Not to mention some found family elements too!

Calla (who was a side character for much of the previous book in the series, Snowfield Palace) has grown up in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere.  She can't remember the last nine years of her life, but her guardians assure her that when she turns nineteen, she'll be able to remember who she is and what happened to her nine years ago.

Nine years ago, the Forest was sealed off, not allowing people in the northern and southern kingdoms to contact each other in any way.  Calla knows this is due to some disaster, and she feels like she should remember what happened, but how could she have been involved if she was a child of ten at the time?

Calla's guardians send her to stay with a friend in the big city, where she's befriended by the chatty and gossipy Belle and pursued romantically by Belle's brother Johnston.  Calla also makes friends with the sweet Elaeza and her brother Hansel, both of whom are much kinder than Belle and Johnston.  Which pair of siblings can Calla truly trust?  She really wonders about this when Elaeza and Hansel turn out to be royalty and ask her to stay with them at Thornrose Estate.  Why would they seek the company of a nobody with no memory of her childhood?

Of course, Calla's memories eventually return, and she joins one set of friends in fighting the other, trying to break the curse that binds the Forest and its Gardiner.  Plus, she falls in love with a man who can turn into a wolf, which echoes a couple of her favorite fairy tales.

I like that a lot of what happened in Snowfield Palace got resolved in this book -- I'm so glad Ardnek didn't drag that out until the final book of the series, which is expected to launch this fall.  Though I can see that some of this book's ending is setting things up for that final adventure, so everything is not fully resolved yet.

Once again, Ardnek cleverly twists a Jane Austen novel (Northanger Abbey) with a fairy tale ("Beauty and the Beast") and uses them to craft an entirely new story of her own.

Particularly Good Bits: 

Wasn't that why she read all of the books that she did?  So she could pretend that the lives of the heroines were hers.  Pretend that there were people who loved her and adventures that she could travel.  But it was only ever pretend (p. 136).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some violence, scenes of peril, and kissing.  As with the rest of the series, no smut or bad language.

This is my 3rd book read from my 10 Books of Summer list, and the 40th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.