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.