After sharing my very short Cinderella story last week, I thought it would be fun to share a scene from the Cinderella portion of The People the Fairies Forget (more background here). This scene starts at The Nightingale, an inn run by the heroine of this section, Catherine. She’s a cousin to Jack, the hero of the Sleeping Beauty section. Tarragon, my fairy and narrator, has been hanging out at The Nightingale recently, but hasn’t revealed his magical abilities.
Earlier in the story, Prince Roderick threw a ball, and invited every eligible woman in the country to attend (it was a large ball). Catherine, though engaged to be married, attended the ball for the sake of the food and the dancing. Tarry came too, for the same reasons, and while they were there they saw that the prince’s favorite dance partner had mysteriously run out on him, leaving a glass shoe behind.
A few days later, they’re hanging out at The Nightingale, when…
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…we were interrupted by a sudden explosion of apples.
Another of The Nightingale’s staff had come through the door, carrying a box of apples that had just been delivered. He tripped on the threshold, dropped the box and sent red apples tumbling around the room. No one looked surprised, including him. I had already learned that his name was Richard Samuel Jones, and that this sort of event was normal for him.
“Are you all right, Sam?” Catherine asked, bending down for an apple that had rolled near her feet.
“I’m fine,” Sam said, rising to a crouch to gather up apples. As he did, he remarked, “There’s all kinds of excitement going on out in the street. Royal heralds and everything. They’re going door to door.” Continue reading “When Cinderella’s Slipper Fits”→
To continue with the fairy tale theme of this week, for Fiction Friday I have a very short story I wrote, retelling Cinderella, with some pointed observations thrown in. This actually started out in Spanish, as a class assignment, and then I rewrote it (and expanded it) in English. I wrote this about four years ago, but a lot of the ideas eventually made their way into Book Two of The People the Fairies Forget, “Cinderella’s Substitute.”
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Once upon a time in a far off kingdom there lived a maiden who was very beautiful and very kind. Fairy tales always begin the same way, and the maidens are always very beautiful and very kind. Often their name is Ella, as was the case for the maiden we’re talking about. This particular maiden, as do most of them, had long blond hair, very fair skin and eyes of the deepest blue. She didn’t have any initiative, spirit or goals for her life.
As you know if you visit here regularly, I love retold fairy tales. But…not always. Unfortunately, including fairy tale elements is not a guarantee of a high quality book (just a usually promising sign). Towards the end of last year, I read a book that made this abundantly clear: The Frog Princess, by E. D. Baker.
On Monday, I mentioned that I could name lots of characters from Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles. As for The Frog Princess…I can’t think of a single name. Granted, I only read it once and it was a few months ago…but I don’t think it’s entirely me.
Illustration from "The Frog Prince." Emma's not this pretty.
The princess (I’ll look up her name to make this easier to describe–Emma) is one of a big crop of ordinary princesses who seem to turn up in books often. She’s not pretty enough and she trips and she doesn’t like dancing. Without trying, I can think of three other books with princesses like that (plus one Cinderella), and most of them have more going on to make the heroines interesting. Cimorene, from Enchanted Forest, doesn’t like her princess lessons, so she bullies various people at the castle to teach her other things, like cooking and fencing and sorcery. That’s interesting. I’m not sure what Emma does, other than irritate her mother and run off to the swamp sometimes.
In the swamp, she meets a talking frog who claims to be a prince. After a lot of balking about kissing him (by the way–he’s a talking frog and all he wants is for you to kiss him so he can be human again–just do it, it’s not asking that much and what’s the worst that could happen?) she goes ahead and does. Only to turn into a frog herself (okay, I guess bad things could happen). Sound a lot like the Disney movie? I’m not sure the precise connection, but at least some editions of this have a label saying it’s the inspiration for the movie, so they must have bought rights or something.
Unfortunately, the book only had the one good idea. Disney, wisely, used that single idea and nothing else. Emma and the frog (Eadric, I looked him up too) go off to find the witch who enchanted him, and have a series of adventures along the way. Which is all well and good, but kind of like Emma doesn’t stand out at all as an ordinary princess, the adventures and the world they’re in don’t stand out either. There was nothing at all distinctive about it. I’m not looking for Tolkien, who invented entire languages for his magical races. But when you have a generic princess having generic adventures in a generic magical kingdom…not very memorable.
If all this genericness was the backdrop to something else–funny scenes or interesting relationships between the characters–this still might be passable. But it’s really not that funny. A few “help, I’m a frog” jokes.
The relationships were overwhelmingly flat too. No one had any depths of emotion. I’d forgotten the characters’ names, but I did remember a scene where they’re talking about something or other, and Emma tells Eadric he’s her best friend. This should be revelatory. They haven’t known each other long, they spend as much time arguing as not, it’s not like saying that to an old friend who already knows it. Yet Emma says it off-hand, and Eadric–doesn’t react! I think I actually stared at the page for a few seconds wondering if I’d missed something.
Sometimes I’ve heard someone comment that they don’t expect as much depth in children’s or young adult books. It’s a comment I actually disagree with–children’s and YA books may cover different emotions and perhaps explore them in different ways than books for grown-ups, but the good ones will still have depth. There is no reason a children’s book can’t sound deeper emotions in the areas of friendship, finding one’s place in the world, dealing with a life-altering situation, falling in love for the first time or going on an extremely dangerous quest. But I think those people who don’t expect depth are imagining a book just like The Frog Princess. It’s a kid’s book, so even though all that’s going on, we don’t really need to explore any of it.
I rarely recommend a movie over a book, but in this case, if you want a story about a girl turning into a frog, watch the Disney movie.
I was recently sketching over the plotline of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede for a friend, and realized that I actually remembered all the character names. As I’ve mentioned in at least one other post, I am bad at character names. Oh sure, I remember the main character, but the main character’s best friend? Possibly not.
But, for The Enchanted Forest Chronicles…Cimorene is the heroine, and her best friend is named Alianora. And I could probably give you at least another six or seven names besides. All of which should say something about how great this series is!
Don't mind the creases--they're well-read
It all starts with Cimorene, a princess who decides that she’d rather be kidnapped by a dragon than marry the boring prince her parents picked out. Princesses are kidnapped by dragons sometimes, you know, so, taking advice from an enchanted frog, Cimorene goes off to find a dragon and volunteer. The dragon Kazul agrees to take her on, especially after hearing that Cimorene can cook cherries jubilee.
Is that already enough to convince you these are wonderful books? If not, I can also tell you that the story goes on with evil wizards, all manner of enchanted creatures, a magical forest (of course) and endless fun references to fairy tales. They’re funny, exciting, and even romantic in spots.
It’s not a romance with that boring prince from the beginning–Prince Therandil does turn up, but he stays insufferable. He comes to fight the dragon to rescue Cimorene; he would have come back earlier in the book, except that he was waiting for Kazul to defeat an impressive number of challengers first. He’s very put out when Cimorene explains no one’s actually fought Kazul–she’s been talking the challengers out of it, which has been very inconvenient and time-consuming.
Wrede has created one of those wonderful things in retold fairy tales–a world where there are strange and marvelous things like djinns and enchanted swords and magical caves and (of course) dragons, but where you also have to deal with getting the right pot for your cherries jubillee, and cleaning the dust out of (non-magical) caves.
The series is a quartet, plus a couple of short stories. I think my favorite book is the third, narrated by the witch Morwen, who has nine talking cats (who only she understands). This one also features a rabbit named Killer, who has a penchant for stumbling into spells, piling layer after layer of enchantment on himself. In a magical, rabbit sort of way, he’s not unlike my character, Jones.
I don’t think any of the books retell any specific fairy tale, but they’re all riddled with references, sometimes made quite casually. When Cimorene’s parents want her to get married, she says she’s too young. Her mother replies, “Your Great-Aunt Rose was married at sixteen…One really can’t count all those years she spent asleep under that dreadful fairy’s curse.” In the second book we meet a giant who’s very friendly as long as your name isn’t Jack, and a dwarf named Herman who tried the Rumpelstiltskin trade, but got stuck with tons of children when no one could guess his name (and he thought Herman would be easy).
I could probably go on citing incidents and examples for a long time…but better to just read the books. They’re good adventures, very funny–and obviously, have memorable characters!
Sometimes, the muse is fickle. Sometimes a story starts out beautifully, and then completely stalls out. So this is fair warning that today’s Fiction Friday is from a story that never got finished. It went beautifully for about four chapters, and then I ran into some major issues, and went on to a different project. I may come back to this one, but for now it’s incomplete. I know the full plotline so if anyone’s really curious I can tell you about it, but it hasn’t been written yet.
But I thought the first chapter was pretty entertaining, and I hope you might find it that way too, even without the rest of the story to follow.
This is in the same world as The People the Fairies Forget, but a different time and a different country. Fun bit of trivia: the countries in this world all have names inspired by fairy tale writers (or retellers). This story is mostly set in Gaicaveene, which is named for Gail Carson Levine, and Rokinlay, named for Robin McKinley.
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She looked up at the castle and shivered. It was cold and there was a wind blowing—but it wasn’t that kind of shiver. And it wasn’t, from appearance, the kind of castle that should make a person shiver. It was a shiver that should be prompted by looming parapets of crumbling stone, moss grown walls and birds of prey winging beneath a full moon. It wasn’t a shiver that one would expect from gleaming white towers, rooftops shining golden beneath an afternoon sun, and pennants waving gaily in the wind.
She pulled her silk scarf more tightly across her face and told herself to stop being excessively imaginative. It was a bad habit.
Tales of the Marvelous 