Tag: Sleeping Beauty

Cursed by Christening Gifts

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Reviews, Young AdultLeave a comment

My quest for retold fairy tales most recently brought me to Sleeping Helena by Erzebet Yellowboy. As you can probably guess from the title, it was a retelling of Sleeping Beauty.  And it was…an odd one.

Helena has eight aunts, who all give her special gifts at her christening.  Six offer her well-meaning things like beauty and dancing ability.  One issues a complicated prophecy that seems to predict death.  And the eighth uses her gift to try to undo the curse.  Seven of the aunts raise Helena together, while desperately trying to protect her from the curse.  As the book goes on, we realize that the aunt who issued the curse, Katza, has more complicated motives than it seemed.  It’s all tied into the tragic death of their brother, a century before.

Yes, they have a brother who died a hundred years ago.  Everyone in the family is blessed (or cursed) with extraordinarily long life, which is the first place this starts to get odd.  It’s a little disconcerting when most of the characters are 105 or thereabouts.  Especially when they haven’t been given youth–they really are 105, and apparently feel that way.  I have nothing against elderly characters, but it makes it kind of hard to relate to.

It’s also rather depressing to think about seven sisters living together from childhood into old age, and if any of them ever got married or formed any meaningful attachments outside of their family group, we don’t hear about them.

The purpose of it is so that Helena’s sixteenth birthday can be exactly 100 years after Katza’s sixteenth birthday, which is also when their brother died tragically.  So you get Sleeping Beauty’s hundred years–but going back from the day the curse strikes, instead of forward.

Helena is the most interesting character, although more as a concept than as a person.  I love the way this examines what it would be like to have eight christening gifts.  Helena is so filled with her gifts, there’s no room in her personality for anything else (and they forgot to give her compassion or sympathy or kindness…)  She is utterly absorbed in herself and her gifts, which are constantly clamoring at her to be used–she wants always to dance, to sing, to admire her beauty, and so on.  In some ways, they seem more like curses than the curse.

This does take some interesting turns, and I particularly liked the flashbacks to Katza and her brother, Louis, when they were young.  I ended up disappointed by the ending, though.  I won’t give away the details, but essentially just when it was getting to something really interesting–it ended.

I have to come down somewhere in the middle on this one.  It wasn’t so bad that I’ll talk a friend out of buying it (The Frog Princess—actually, she was going to buy one of the sequels and I convinced her it was a terrible idea) or so good that I’ll push it on friends (Robin McKinley–anything by her, really).  It was okay.  So if you have a particular fondness for Sleeping Beauty or some of the elements sound especially interesting, you could give it a try.

Author’s Site: http://www.erzebet.com/

Sleeping Beauty, Awake and Fighting

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Reviews, Young Adult2 Comments

What if Sleeping Beauty didn’t turn out the way all those fairies at her christening intended?  That’s one element–and my favorite–of Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley.

There’s a line in The People the Fairies Forget when Tarry wonders what christening-gifted people would be like without the enchantments.  How does it change a person to be enchanted to be compassionate?  In my book, Sleeping Beauty is only a minor character, and is about what you’d expect her to be like if you’ve ever read Charles Perrault.

But Rosie isn’t.  Rosie is Sleeping Beauty in Spindle’s End, and is wonderfully NOT what she’s supposed to be.  She has long eyelashes and fair skin and golden hair, but she keeps the hair cut short so it doesn’t have the chance to fall into ringlets (and ends up a fuzzy, curly mass).  She hates dancing and embroidery, so it doesn’t matter that she’s enchanted to be good at them.  Her laugh may resemble a bell, but it must be a very large and unusual bell.  And most importantly, she is wonderfully, obstinately, stubbornly herself.  She’s not at all sure she even wants to be a princess, and she’s not going to just take a curse lying down.

McKinley does in Spindle’s End some of my favorite things about retold fairy tales.  We all know this story–princess cursed to prick her finger and die, fairies carry her off into the woods to keep her safe, spindles get destroyed, etc.  But she’s retold it with lots of clever, unexpected, practical twists.  What was Sleeping Beauty’s relationship with those fairies, considering they’re the only family she’s ever known?  Does she have her own plans for her life?  What’s it like to get princess-ness dropped into your lap one day?  And how do all those christening gifts turn out?

The gifts are wonderful, Rosie is wonderful, and the fairies–very practical fairies who are human-sized, don’t shed sparkles, don’t have wings, but do some impressive magic–are wonderful too.

I hate to say it, but one reservation here–I’ve never found the romance wonderful.  There is one, but it’s never felt right to me.  I’ve read this at least twice, so the most recent time I knew the romance was coming.  I really, really tried to see it coming, to anticipate it and wrap my head around it, but…while there are one or two cute moments, on the whole it just didn’t feel right.

It may be me.  It’s the kind of romance I often have trouble with.  Sometimes books like to create a friendship between a girl and an older man, which then turns into a romance when the girl grows up.  Once in a while it works for me.  Usually it doesn’t.  (On that subject, as a minor spoiler to the unwritten sequel of Red’s Girl, Red and Tamara are never going to be romantically involved.  Ever.)

But don’t let this turn you off the book.  Because honestly, I think Rosie’s relationships with her “aunts” (the two fairies) and her best friend are the more important ones than the romance, and they’re all very good.

And I love practical fairy tales.  The book opens with some lovely pages about how magic works in this country, and it’s this fantastic combination of total fantasy mixed with practical details about how people go about living their lives with this magic around them.  Magic sort of accumulates around cooking pots, for example, and fairies have to disenchant them every so often, by laying a finger on them.  Absent-minded fairies tend to have burn-scars on their fingers.  And when the evil fairy’s curse goes out, a decree is issued to lop off the tips of the spindles on all the spinning wheels.  How much more reasonable than burning every spinning wheel, and decimating the cloth industry!

My particular fairy tale retold is all about pulling out the most absurd bits of fairy tales and having more practical-minded characters try to work around them.  But I love retold fairy tales that work around those more absurd bits and make them make sense.  And I so enjoy McKinley’s rational, funny, sweet retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” that is the original story…but not quite the way Perrault told it.

A Multiplicity of Jacks, and One Tom

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews1 Comment

I really, really wanted to love The Secret History of Tom Trueheart by Ian Beck.  But I didn’t.  My feelings were much more mixed.

I really do love the premise.  Tom has six older brothers named Jack, who all go on adventures in the Land of Stories.  How fun is that?  First, the idea that you can walk through a gate and enter a magical land where fairy tales happen to you, and that there’s a family where they have this tradition of going off on adventures…love it!  And I love the idea of gently poking fun at the way fairy tale heroes (non-princes, at least) are always named Jack.

Tom is the youngest (making him the seventh son–very fairy tale proper, that) and the smallest, and he’s convinced that he’s the least brave.  He’s the only one who hasn’t gone off on adventures, but when all his older brothers mysteriously disappear, then it’s up to him to find out what happened.  I’m not going to try to claim that that’s terribly original, but it’s from the children’s section, and I like stories about characters who don’t think they’re brave and have to find qualities in themselves they didn’t know they had in order to save the day.

So far we’re doing great.  But.  (And you knew this was coming.)  But…we have to read what happened to go wrong with each Jack.  And we have to read what happens when Tom ultimately helps them.  Don’t forget, the Jacks are in the Land of Story to embark on fairy tales.  So what this ultimately turns into is a lot of retelling of fairy tales.

We get the first half early on in the story: Jack gets halfway into Sleeping Beauty’s castle (or whatever) and gets into some kind of trouble.  The book goes on, Tom has his adventure, we come back later, and Tom helps Jack rescue the princess.  (Sorry if that was a spoiler, but I doubt it surprised anyone).  The trouble is, nothing all that original happens to the fairy tale itself.  Tom is thrown into it, but it’s not really that different.

Tom’s story is original, when we’re following him, but when we’ve also got six Jacks to get through, I felt like I spent way too much of the book just reading stories I already knew.  This might have been better with about half as many Jacks, and only half as many fairy tales.

That points directly to my other problem: while I love that idea of six characters named Jack, they do run together.  Beck tried to distinguish them, by giving them all a nickname like Jacques or Jackson or Jake, but I was still getting them mixed up.  I’m not very good with character names though, so that might just be me.

Like I said, I have mixed feelings on this book.  I love the premise.  However, I’d only recommend reading it if you’re also in the mood to reread the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, because that’s more or less what you end up doing, in between Tom’s adventure.

I recently found out there are two sequels, and since the premise is so good, I just might investigate them.

Author’s site: http://tomtrueheart.com/

The Curse Strikes

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

This week for Fiction Friday, I thought I’d share another excerpt from The People the Fairies Forget, my young adult fantasy novel.  You can read a little about the premise here, and catch up with previous excerpts here and here.

            In brief, the story so far: Princess Rosaline was cursed by the Evil Fairy Echinacea at her christening to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die.  Good Fairy Marjoram transformed the death curse into a spell for enchanted sleep until awakened by a kiss.  Tarragon (a free agent fairy unaffiliated with either group, and our narrator) thinks the whole thing is kind of stupid.  He also has a wager on with Marj about whether True Love can be found among non-royalty; he says yes and she says no.  He’s chosen a goatherd named Jack and a kitchenmaid named Emmy, who works at Rosaline’s castle, to prove his point, although the details of how this will be demonstrated have yet to be revealed to the reader.

            As we join, Rosaline has just pricked her finger.  Marj, out of deep concern that Rosaline will be lonely if she wakes up in a hundred years and everyone else is gone, has put the rest of the castle to sleep too.  Tarry has seen to it that Jack and his herd of goats, including the Little One, a baby goat, have come to the castle to investigate.

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           When we arrived at the main entrance to the castle, Jack stopped short to stare at the yards and yards and yards of thorns.

            The area around the castle was by no means deserted.  A considerable crowd had gathered already, and more were arriving.  Many looked on with eager curiosity and loudly theorized regarding what had happened—they were plainly onlookers, come to see the excitement.  Others, the ones who appeared more distressed, had to be friends and relatives of the people inside.  Marj should’ve seen what she’d caused.  But she wasn’t there, of course.

            The goats settled in and started eating the lawn.  Jack eyed the thorns.  They weren’t just thorns.  Marj would never dream of magicking up something that plain and ugly, so she’d made enchanted roses instead. There were roses swarming all over the outer wall of the castle and spreading at least three hundred feet out into the fields in a tangled mass far above our heads.  They had vivid red blossoms and sharp thorns.

            Jack scratched the Little One’s head, and stared at the roses.  “I have to get through there.  How am I going to get through there?”

Continue reading “The Curse Strikes” →

Curse Details and Burnt Spindles

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

This week’s Fiction Friday features another excerpt from my novel, The People the Fairies Forget.  You can read the first chapter here.  This excerpt is partway into chapter two.

The story so far: Tarragon is a unusual fairy.  Besides disliking sparkles, he prefers ordinary people to royalty.  The story opens when Tarry attends a christening where Echinacea curses the Princess Rosaline to prick her finger and die, and Tarry’s cousin Marjoram (a certified Good Fairy) changes the death into sleep.  Tarry suggests a bet with Marj on whether a non-royal couple can have True Love.  The details of the bet haven’t been explained yet, but sixteen years after the christening (give or take), Tarry is back at Rosaline’s castle looking for a couple who can prove his point.

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            I wandered out of the stable and into the courtyard, where a flock of kitchen girls were gathered in the sunshine.  They were pretty girls, and I drifted that way.  I might have anyway, but right now it served my business too.  Some of them had to be romantically involved with someone.  Maybe even with the goatherd who was sitting on the stoop in their midst.  I knew he was a goatherd because there was a baby goat sitting next to him, and because I’m magical.  Magic also told me his name was Jack.

            I sat down near the fringe of the group, to listen in on the conversation.  No one knew me, but none of them noticed anything odd in that.  That’s an easy piece of magic.  Not an invisibility spell, just a don’t-take-much-notice-or-think-about-it spell.  That’s a useful one when I really want to go at a banquet table without attracting stares.  Keeps people from reacting to the pointed ears too, if the hair isn’t enough to hide them.  Or a good hat works.

            The kitchen girls, and goatherd, were having an animated conversation about the princess and her curse.  It would’ve been more useful to me if they had been talking about their romances, but I stayed anyway, thinking I still might be able to pick up something.

            The head cook, a woman clearly fond of her own cooking, had been at the christening and was relating the story now in thrilling tones.  It had grown more dramatic over the years.  Echinacea was uglier, the smoke was darker, the general horror was greater, you know how it goes.  Though to give the cook credit, she wasn’t entirely silly.

            “There’s some who say that it has to be a prince that wakes the sleeping princess,” the cook said, “or that it has to be true love’s kiss to break the spell, but I was there, and all that fairy said was a kiss.  Could be anyone.”

Continue reading “Curse Details and Burnt Spindles” →