The Lady and the Wish - Jill Stengl (Release Day Review!)

Wow.  And again wow.  This was such a fun book.  It’s my favorite fairy tale retelling so far this year… and if you’ve been watching this blog, you know that I’ve been reading a LOT of fairy tales in 2019.

Lady Gillian is a spoiled, selfish, social-media maven who has wandered through several of the previous books in search of a handsome royal husband.  When she receives a proposal of marriage from a random guy with a crazy-looking beard, she turns him down cold.  Unfortunately, it turns out that her father is seriously in debt to Crazy-Beard-Guy’s family and that her father had offered her in marriage to the guy as payment without bothering to tell her.  But she’s not off the hook.  Now she has to go and act as the companion to Crazy-Beard-Guy’s elderly grandmother, whose dementia and mysterious wish-granting magic make a deadly combination.  If Gillian doesn’t learn to let go of her pride, she’s going to lose her sanity.

The Lady and the Wish is the fourth book in Jill Stengl’s Faraway Castle series, a set of fairy tales about a magical modern-world resort where all sorts of fairy tale creatures live, thrive, and make mischief.  Even though it’s the fourth book, I think you could start reading the series here.

High Points

Writing a redemptive arc for a main character is hard to do convincingly, but in this case I was definitely convinced.  Gillian’s slow progress toward compassion makes perfect sense in context.  Although she begins the story as a brat, by the time she’s suffered from a few of Lady B’s crazy wishes, you are definitely rooting for her.  And I appreciated the way she slowly figures out how to deal with and even care for the confused Lady B, whose combination of vulnerability and nastiness reminded me of my own grandmother in her last years.

I’m not sure this is a high point exactly, but Max makes a great villain.  Such a creep!  Knowing that this is a series of fairy tale books does make me wonder, though: is he going to turn out to be Bluebeard?  Or the Beast?  (Probably not the Beast, since maybe the Gamekeeper is the Beast…)

The slow-growing relationship between Gillian and Manny was really solid and fun to read.  It was definitely not instalove, which I appreciated.  Who wouldn’t like a guy who fixes stuff, calms dozens of agitated dogs with a word, has zero cookie-decorating ability, and crosses continents to ensure your safety?

And so…

This book wasn’t at all what I expected.  The previous three books mostly take place at Faraway Castle (although Siren & Scholar has some parts that don’t) but in this book we only visit there at the very beginning and end.  The previous three books also have heroines that have magic (… I think Ella has some magic…) and are already pretty nice people, although both Kamoana and Rosa had some stuff to work out.  But Gillian has no magic, has no defenses against magic (which would have been very helpful in this book), and starts out nasty.  Yet I think she’s my favorite heroine so far.  (Yes, I know that I said this about Rosa back when The Rose and the Briar came out.  See review here.)

Cinder Ellie was fun, Siren was smart, Rose and Briar had a wonderful heart.  But Wish is fun AND smart AND full of heart.  More like this please!

Find the book here.

Find Jill Stengl’s website here.

My Faraway Castle Recommended Reading Order

Cinder Ellie (novella)

The Little Siren (novella)

The Siren and the Scholar (book 2)

Ellie and the Prince (book 1)

The Rose and the Briar (book 3)

The Lady and the Wish (book 4)

You can start with Wish if you like, or read Rose as soon as you’ve read Cinder Ellie.  But don’t read Ellie and the Prince without first reading Cinder Ellie, nor read The Siren and the Scholar without first reading The Little Siren.

April Showers of Fairy Tale Reviews!

The fairy tale madness continues!

There’s a fairy tale retelling that I really, really want to review for you right now but can’t, because it isn’t out yet.  (When o when will it be out?  I must declare my happiness to the world!)  The Lady and the Wish by Jill Stengl.  Definitely add it on Goodreads or something so that you know when it comes out.  Anyway, on to the business at hand.

Brittany Fichter - Blinding Beauty

 

In Becoming Beauty, Isa and Ever had to deal with a Beauty-and-the-Beast-esque plot as well as attacks from an evil foreign sorceress (find my review here).  While they’re married now in the second book, their troubles aren’t over.  When they’re summoned to a neighboring kingdom to attend the contest that will determine whom Princess Olivia marries, they realize that a sinister glass magician is working behind the scenes to choose the winning candidate.  And when Isa’s brother Launce enters the contest to try to figure out what’s going on, he becomes caught up in the glass magician’s plot.

This book has a mix of elements from The Princess and the Glass Hill, The Snow Queen, and the author’s own fertile brain.  I enjoyed a lot of things about it—the glass magician’s sneakiness, Launce and Olivia’s funny relationship-not-relationship, the fact that Ever and Isa have to work through Major Stuff in their marriage.  But some things bothered me.  Most notably: Launce doesn’t like Ever, his sister’s husband, much at all—for good reasons—so his chosen method for protesting the situation is… to be childishly rude.  All the time.  I found it hard to root for him in any scene where both he and Ever were present.  Still, he’s okay when Ever isn’t around and hilarious in combination with Olivia.  So I’ll keep reading the series.

Melanie Cellier – The Princess Fugitive and The Princess Pact

 

I really enjoyed Cellier’s first book in the Four Kingdoms series, The Princess Companion, a barely-magical retelling of The Princess and the Pea/Cinderella which I reviewed here.  So I was excited to read the next two books in the series: The Princess Fugitive and The Princess Pact.

Fugitive is an adventure tale loosely based on Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White.  Princess Ava, the villain of Book 1, flees her home in company with her bodyguard, the devoted Hans, after a family member sends an assassin to kill her.  She must travel in disguise and make her way safely out of the kingdom in a trading caravan populated with friendly secondary characters.  But when a strange encounter in the forest turns her heart and life upside down, she must enlist the help of her former enemies to save her kingdom.

Pact is another adventure, this one based on Rumplestiltskin and The Pied Piper of Hamelin.  Princess Marie, who had a bit part in Book 1, is a proper princess who longs for excitement.  When her brother runs off to confront a band of rebels in the forest—young people lured from the kingdom’s villages by mysterious means—and Marie finds out a shocking secret about her birth, she follows her brother to the rebel camp.  Only her brother isn’t there.  Instead, she meets the mysterious R, leader of the rebels; the handsome and dramatic Rafe, who is spying on the rebels; and the rebels themselves (mostly friendly secondary characters).  Marie must decide if she’s going to thwart the rebellion or find herself a new future.

Both of these stories were fine.  Really they were.  But where Companion plays to Cellier’s strengths as an author—slow-growing relationships in a relatively peaceful setting, with an already-Christian heroine who could speak wisdom to others—Fugitive and Pact do not.  They involve action and danger (not always believable), quick introduction of secondary characters (who we don’t always have time to grow to care about), and love interests which are obvious from the very first paragraph in which they are mentioned.  They lack characters which can function as the moral compass of the story.  (The godmothers wander through and provide a little clarity, but not a lot.)  I spent the middle third of Fugitive and pretty much all of Pact being very frustrated with the heroines.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed so many problems with these books if I hadn’t liked Companion and the beginning of Fugitive so much.  (At the beginning of her book she was cold and haunted and determined and, most importantly, real.  I cared a lot about her and her problems.  But very soon she lost her distinctive voice.)

I’ll keep reading Cellier’s books.  As I said, I liked Companion, and I really liked Silver and Shadow, the first book of another linked series.  I just got Tale of Beauty and the Beast from the library and I’m excited to read it.  But I don’t know if Fugitive and Pact would stand up to re-reading.