A Review of Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

Most fairy tale retellings are built around just one story, occasionally two. Enchanted gives us the Woodcutter family, whose children—most named after days of the week—appear to be the stars of a bunch of well-known fairy tales: The Princess and the Frog, Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, and Jack and the Beanstalk, to name just a few.

Sunday is the main focus of the book. She befriends an enchanted frog, visiting and talking with him more than once and really enjoying their conversations. When she agrees to kiss him, nothing happens. What she doesn't know is that the kiss works, only a little later. All she knows is that her friend disappears and she misses him.

Meanwhile, the frog prince, Grumble-now-Rumbold, has returned to his palace, where not everyone is glad to have him back. The Woodcutter family knows Rumbold as the prince who was responsible for their son and brother Jack disappearing. Rumbold's father, a suspiciously youthful king, appears to be tangled up in some kind of dark magic. When the king throws three balls, ostensibly in honor of his son, and begins to woo Sunday's sister Wednesday himself, Sunday is very worried. Her aunt, a fairy named Joy, begins teaching Sunday magic, but what of the fairy named Sorrow, who lives in the palace? It's all very complicated.

Take a look at the beanstalk, its seeds planted, not by Jack, but by Sunday's fey adopted brother, Trix. The stalks are growing up around a huge old tree.

Magic and monsters, all before breakfast. Sunday wouldn't have it any other way. She bravely cupped a hand around a budding leaf; its new velvet skin tickled her palm as it unfurled and continued to stretch its way heavenward. The monster stalk's leaves yawned above the tree's top into the breaking light of dawn. The vines plaited themselves into a mass as thick as the trunk of the tree at its base. Sunday's feet itched, remembering her own waltz as she watched the vines dance.

There is magic around every corner in this book, and sometimes it seems a bit cobbled together, even frenetic: How many fairy tales, tropes, and even nursery rhymes can we jam into one book? Each of the Woodcutter siblings should be an entire book, and maybe that's where Kontis is going with this. It's as if, magically speaking, you had a family in which one sibling was Sandra Day O'Connor, another was Yo Yo Ma, another was Kobe Bryant, and so on. All of it is fascinating, but there's just so much going on. I would also say that the plot feels middle grade, but the romance and character interactions come across as YA (the book's apparent market).

Of course, Enchanted cries out to be read without too much analysis—the thing to do is just enjoy the ride and cheer for the good guys, waiting for Sunday and Rumbold to defeat the villain and share a happily-ever-after kiss. I suspect that Kontis can only get better—she has a wonderful imagination. (12 and up)

Note for Worried Parents: The villains' scheme is creepy and there's some violence and peril, but I would say the book is just fine for upper middle grade and tween readers.

Also: I requested a copy of this book from the Amazon Vine program.

A Review of Snow in Summer by Jane Yolen

We begin with a description of an old photograph showing a little girl named Snow in Summer on the day of her mother's funeral. Her father is oblivious to the existence of his seven-year-old daughter, devoured by his grief. Only Cousin Nancy is aware of Summer and her needs. She holds the little girl by the hand, offering comfort.

Jane Yolen's retelling of the Snow White story is eerie and immediate. The Appalachian setting adds both simplicity and strangeness as we watch the child's life changed, first by her mother's death and her father's withdrawal and later by the menacing incursion of the woman who marries her father.

Snow in Summer is almost a horror story when it comes to the wicked stepmother. Although the child named Summer suffers when her father ignores her, at least she has Cousin Nancy, who continues to care for her, stopping by the house each day to get her ready for school and cook her meals.

Most of the chapters in Yolen's story are told by Snow in Summer herself, but some are memories recounted by Cousin Nancy and even Stepmama. When Snow (as Stepmama names her) watches her father snared in a graveyard by the woman from up the mountain, there is clearly dark magic involved. In Stepmama's first memory chapter, we learn that the woman was trained by a great conjurer. We also find out that Stepmama can increase her personal magic by taking someone else's years. She plans to get Snow's father's property for herself and sell it to the railroad company, something he has always refused to do. Then she will use her magic to steal seven years from Snow. (She also toys with the idea of making Snow her apprentice.) But she claims she won't make Snow and her father suffer—too much. As she tells herself, "After all, I'm not a wicked woman."

The creepy little details are actually more striking than the things Stepmama tells us in her chapters. The way she has one green eye and one blue eye. The way she must have Snow's permission to enter the house, like a vampire. The terrible spell she casts on Snow's father. The glass bottles of potions.

"They could make you very sick, Snow," she cautioned, clinking a long red fingernail against the glass of the darkest bottle. Something almost seemed to stir in the depths, something with hands and feet and closed eyes. Something like a dead baby.

That's even before Stepmama takes Snow to the church with the snake handlers. And before Snow learns that there are worse things than snakes.

This well-crafted story gradually builds in dread. (Though the seven dwarfs—well, six plus a brother off at college—provide a bit of comic relief.) The intense, atmospheric storytelling breathes new life into a tale we all think we know. Yolen's best character is Stepmama, who makes the Disney villains look insipid by comparison. You may be a little disappointed when the story is over and things get better for Snow. No more dread. Sigh—The End.


Here's a Reading Rocket interview with Jane Yolen from March 2010 and her website.

Note for Worried Parents: Amazon lists this book for ages 10 and up. There are references to Snow in Summer getting her period, and you get the feeling she's going to be raped at one point, though it turns out she's (only!) going to be murdered instead. The emotional content and some child abuse make me want to say this is a fairly mature read, but then, it probably depends on the kid.

A Review of Entwined by Heather Dixon

What a real and personable world Heather Dixon creates in this book! Hers is the fifth retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" to come out in the last four years, but it is nevertheless a standout. (See my post about three of them. You can also check out the Once Upon a Time version, Suzanne Weyn's The Night Dance. I believe still another version is due out next year!)

A year earlier, eleven princesses hid in the rose bushes to watch the Yuletide ball while their mother was upstairs, awaiting the birth of her twelfth daughter.

They had fallen asleep right there in the rose bushes, burrowing together like mice. When the girls were discovered missing, Mother had stopped the ball and made everyone—including the musicians—search for them. Prime Minister Fairweller had found them. Azalea had awoken in shivers to see him holding a lamp over them and frowning.
The girls had pelted him with snowballs.
They had lost two weeks of dance lessons over the Great Rose Bush and Snowball Scandal. It had been worth it, they all agreed.

Now Azalea is attending the ball herself, with her sisters no doubt secreted in a new hiding place, watching her. But none of them can feel as giddy as they did the previous year, when their mother was still alive.

In Dixon's retelling of the famous fairy tale, Crown Princess Azalea is a bit of a mother hen, trying to keep her sisters out of trouble while dealing quietly with her own grief and maybe, just maybe, taking an interest in a kindly young man named Lord Bradford. (Or is he simply Mr. Bradford, a commoner?) A case of mistaken names complicates the already subtle dance between these two would-be lovebirds, while Azalea's sisters Bramble and Clover have convoluted romantic troubles of their own.

But the true trouble comes when Azalea mistakenly opens the way to a magical place where a dark stranger named Keeper makes glittering promises, luring the girls into his web of music and dance. At first a magical sanctuary, Keeper's realm turns out to be the fulfillment of century-old curses and sorcerous ambitions.

Watching Azalea and her sisters sort through all of this is thoroughly satisfying, especially as Azalea tries to make meaning of the small clues left to her by her mother. How does magic work, and what does it mean to make a promise?

It may surprise you, then, when I tell you I suspect the most important plot thread in this book is the need for mending the rift between the King and his daughters. His long-time formality and his particular coldness after his wife's death have shaped an estrangement that the very hurt Azalea actively nurtures. Forbidding them to dance is only one of the rules that feel unbearable to the princesses. But this very rift with their father turns out to have created an opening for the Keeper to enter the girls' lives and work his wiles.

Blackmailing Azalea to break his enchantment, Keeper becomes increasingly dangerous. As Azalea comes to realize her peril, she scrambles to protect her family, but the threat has grown beyond her control, and she is hard pressed to save her sisters, her kingdom, and herself.

Fortunately, she and her sisters have allies, not to mention an invisibility cloak that comes in handy at a crucial moment or two. And don't forget the enchanted tea set (though I'm still trying to figure out the precise shape and purpose of the part of the set referred to as "sugar teeth").

Azalea and her sisters are a terrific bunch whose loyalty, humor, and personalities give even the drafty, mysterious palace a feeling of home. The whole book has a nicely Edwardian feel, or perhaps it's Victorian. I'm not surprised to find out that Entwined has already earned three starred reviews from major review sources. I think you'll like these girls and their story very much.

Note for Worried Parents: Although Entwined is aimed at teens, it is wholesome enough for younger readers, probably 10- to 12-year-olds. The only real problems would be the deeply menacing gothic villain and some brief references to sensual attraction.

A Review of Cloaked by Alex Flinn

I haven't read Flinn's second fairy tale retelling, A Kiss in Time, but I did read Beastly, which is about to come out in movie form. That one had such a fun premise, making the Beauty and the Beast prince a spoiled contemporary rich boy. Cloaked, on the other hand, is more of a fairy tale mash-up, with plot points borrowed from The Elves and the Shoemaker, The Frog Prince, The Six Swans, The Golden Bird, The Valiant Tailor, The Salad, and The Fisherman and His Wife. (A handy author's note explains all this!)

Our hero is a boy named Johnny who lives in Miami and works in a shoe repair shop inside a fancy hotel. Like his good friend Meg, he's part of a family business that's barely making ends meet. Unlike Meg, he's interested in seeing the genuine princess who's coming to stay in the hotel.

Victoriana is a gorgeous party girl with a sort of French-sounding accent and all the money in the world, so why would she take the least bit of interest in Johnny? Well, she wants his help. Apparently her brother has been turned into a frog by a wicked witch, and he was last seen heading for Florida. But Victoriana's political enemies are keeping a close watch on her, trying to force her to marry a prince from a rival kingdom, and she can't continue the search herself. She needs a nice, ordinary boy with a heart of gold. She needs a hero! (Cue old song from Footloose soundtrack...)

Oh, and the princess offers to pay Johnny. And even marry him! Since he and his mom are not doing at all well financially, he agrees. But he hides what he's doing from his friend Meg, since she'll think he's nuts if she finds out he believes in fairy tale curses.

Using a magic traveling cloak, part of the equipment Victoriana gives him, Johnny hits the road. He is more or less assisted by six swans and a fox, all of whom used to be human. A lot of funny dialogue from sarcastic enchanted animals ensues, after which the bad guys start chasing Johnny.

Eventually Meg does get in on the action, which is just as well. She seems a lot more savvy than sweet Johnny!

I had a little trouble buying this one for some reason. It's a fairly busy book, and I didn't find all of the subplots convincing. For example, a subplot about Johnny's desire to be a premier shoe designer didn't quite work for me, though I'll admit it's a clever idea. And there's a subplot involving Johnny's father, and one about Meg's secrets. Plus we have those swans to deal with, along with a couple of giants in the Everglades and some mixed-up romance.

The fact that Meg likes Johnny (and he likes her back but hasn't figured it out) is telegraphed from miles away. It's sort of amazing that the boy doesn't get a clue a whole lot sooner. Then again, Johnny is easily snowed by a villainess posing as a hot girl, so his blind spot about girls' intentions is apparently a character trait.

At any rate, Cloaked is an exuberant story, and kids who like fairy tale retellings will probably get a kick out of it. Like Beastly, it has a male protagonist, which is also nice. Pick it up and see what you think!

Note for Worried Parents: This is a book for teens, but it doesn't have anything particularly objectionable in it. A little kissing and some mild teen boy conversations about wanting to connect with beautiful girls in bikinis; that's about it.

A Review of A True Princess by Diane Zahler

In her debut middle grade novel, The Thirteenth Princess, Zahler retold the story of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Now she tackles The Princess and the Pea. As in her earlier book, she takes the basic premise and runs with it, fleshing it out with additional subplots. Our story begins with a girl named Lilia who decides to run away from home. A foundling, Lilia has been raised by a shepherd. While he and his two children, Kai and Karina, love her, the man's second wife does not. Yes, it's a wicked stepmother!

But she's only the initial villain of this piece, quickly left behind. Lilia hits the road, bringing along the blanket that was wrapped around her when she was discovered floating down the river. She is surprised but heartened to find herself accompanied by fellow runaways Kai and Karina.

The children meet some noble strangers at an inn, one of whom, a handsome young man in a blue cloak, seems attracted to pretty Karina. When he and his friends learn that the three are headed toward their own northern kingdom of Dalir, they offer the travelers advice, as well as a sword for protection. Their most important warning is to avoid the Elf-King and his daughter. And if Lilia and her siblings run across Odin's Hunt, they must cover their eyes or they will die. Even so, encountering the hunt will mean that their lives will change in a big way.

Sure enough, as the kids travel through the forest, they are attacked by bandits and get lost. In an encounter with the Elf-King, they end up forfeiting Kai, but at least Lilia is able to make a bargain for perhaps regaining him—along with other human captives, a group of changeling children. And of course the girls manage to run into Odin's Hunt before leaving the woods!

Karina and Lilia next make their way to the palace at Dalir, where they find work and meet the noble strangers yet again. It seems the prince is looking for a bride, and each supposed princess who comes to visit must spend the night in a mysterious room. On a hunt of their own, Lilia and Karina decide they have to search that room...

Lilia is a courageous girl, especially in her determination to save Kai and the changeling children. Karina is quieter, but makes a nice best friend for Lilia. The tone of this book is cheerful and even funny; one amusing touch is a pamphlet owned by one of the palace maids called How to Tell a True Princess. Its tips provide the chapter titles for Zahler's book, mostly presented in tongue-in-cheek opposition to the events of the story: "A True Princess Does Not Eavesdrop," "A True Princess Does Not Perform in Public," "A True Princess Moves with Measured Grace." And so on!

I also like the inclusion of a helpful brownie-type character called a nisse (from Scandinavian folklore, also known as a tomte). He's gruff, but he comes through for Lilia and Karina when they're dealing with the Elf-King.

The plot is predictable at times and relies on a couple of coincidences, but A True Princess is still a fun, fast-paced read, a happy addition to the growing canon of fairy tale retellings. You will no doubt enjoy seeing how Lilia puts the famous pea in a decidedly secondary role in this adventure with a touch of romance. I recommend the book for 9- to 11-year-old girls who like fairy tales and intrepid heroines.

Enchanted Inkpot Repost at SFWA

Okay, I'm pleased about this! The post I wrote at The Enchanted Inkpot on fairy tale retellings has been reposted (with my permission, of course) at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America blog (SFWA). Yay! Here's the link in case you missed it the first time or just want to take a look. Be sure to check out the comments at the original post, since I only listed a handful of retellings, then asked people to talk about their favorites in the comments. (It was really more of a discussion starter!)

Art by John Waterhouse, "Miranda and the Tempest."

Once Upon a Time: Classic Fairy Tale Retellings

Between Shrek and Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted, fairy tale retellings might seem to be an invention of the turn of the millenium. But we can go clear back to the 1920s and 1940s for a quartet of early gems in the retelling corner of the children's fantasy treasury.

You've heard of Arthur Rackham, right? You may not have heard of Charles Seddon Evans, though. C.S. Evans wrote novel or rather novella-length versions of Cinderella in 1919 and Sleeping Beauty in 1920 to accompany Rackham's illustrations. Evans was actually an editor (and later Chairman and Managing Director) of the Heinemann publishing firm.

Evans's retellings might easily have fallen short of Rackham's masterful work, but they are surprisingly strong in their own right. The style is a little old-fashioned, but it's still a lot of fun. Here is an excerpt from Sleeping Beauty:

The first thing [the king] did was to summon all the magicians of his own and neighboring countries, promising a rich reward to the one who could show him a way to defeat the old fairy's malice. The magicians came in scores, some with long beards reaching to their feet, some without any beards at all, some with bald heads, and some with matted hair that looked as though it had not been combed for centuries. For days there were so many magicians about the palace that they were as common as cats, and it was impossible to enter any room without surprising one or the other of them, sitting in deep reflection and looking as wise as only a magician can look. But nothing came of their thinking, and one after the other they gave up the task and departed, having first asked for their traveling expenses.

The story of Sleeping Beauty needs a bit more padding than Cinderella does, so Evans is at his leisure to fill us in about things like the food on the menu at the christening feast. Alternatively droll and painterly, Evans gives us menu items such as "sardines from Sardinia" and "eagles carved of ice hovering over silver dishes filled with apricots." Evans has a knack for fleshing out this well-known story with just the right details, such as presenting the words of the proclamation banning spinning wheels from the kingdom.

All of this makes for a pleasant, leisurely retelling, more of a drawn-out version of the original rather than a true novelization. As for Rackham's illustrations, they are all done in silhouettes, which feels like a lost art form these days. Spreads showing the entire palace and various people in it are especially striking, as are a couple of rather terrifying illustrations of hapless princes trapped in the brambles and turning to skeletons.

We get a lot more description in Evans' Sleeping Beauty than is common in today's fast-paced work, but all of it is very pretty, and certain young readers will enjoy the detailed depiction of the palace—for example, when the hundred years have passed and the prince is making his way through the somnolent rooms. In such scenes, Evans captures Perrault's tone, then extends it.

Evans' Cinderella is arguably the better of the two books, perhaps because he has more plot to play with. Here is Cinderella's father describing the new stepsisters to his daughter, already sounding worried:

"One is called Charlotte," answered her father, and the other Euphronia."
"I like the name of Charlotte," said Ella miserably. "Are they big girls or little ones?"
"Well, you see," said her father, "correctly speaking, they are not girls at all. That is to say, child, they have—ahem—arrived at years of discretion. You must not expect them to play ball or anything like that, or run about the garden with you. They are—what shall we say?—a little sober in temperament; but excellent creatures, nonetheless—excellent creatures. You will get on very well together, I'm sure, with a little give and take on both sides."
"Just a minute, father," pleaded Ella. "Do tell me some more about my new sisters. I cannot understand all the big words you use. Do you mean that they are grown up?"
Her father nodded. "In point of fact, adult," he said, and his tone was so gloomy that Ella had to smile.

Together with Cinderella, we get to know the stepsisters all too well, adding weight to the injustice of her situation. Arthur Rackham's illustrations are again presented in black silhouettes, although he uses a little gray to add dimension to the grander scenes. Cinderella attends the ball for two nights running, allowing the story to build more suspensefully. It also makes the romance a bit more credible. Evans gives us an all-too-real concern from Cinderella herself after the second ball: "It is the Princess he loves... If he could see me now in these ragged clothes, or find me at my drudgery in the kitchen, would he recognize me? And even if he did know me again, would he be horrified to think that he had danced with a kitchen-maid?"

Fortunately, the prince is not so shallow as all that. "He felt sure that she must be in some trouble, otherwise she would not have run away from the ball so suddenly." He resolves to find her and help her. And he suspects she might have been the poorly dressed girl the guards saw running away.

One of my favorite parts of this book is that Rackham and Evans promenade the shoe-aspiring girls in batches. On one page, we are told, "First of all came the princesses," and we are shown two princesses in silhouette. The next page says, "and then the duchesses," with three duchesses shown below. "And then the countesses," six of them. "And so on to the plain gentlewomen," (ten women), "until it was the turn of the servants in the kitchen, but the slipper would not go on the foot of any of them" (twelve servant girls and a cat). That's in the palace, but of course we know the search will broaden its reach and lead us to "happily ever after."

The Rackham and Evans books are very nice, and I do recommend them; however, they have to step aside modestly when they see the next two books coming... Eleanor Farjeon's clever, whimsical, often-funny voice makes her Cinderella retelling, The Glass Slipper, and her Rumpelstiltskin retelling, The Silver Curlew, true classics.

Even if you think you've never heard of Eleanor Farjeon, you might know who she is—she wrote the poem "Morning Has Broken," which was set to music and performed by Cat Stevens. (She is also the author of a long and luxuriously fantastical story about jump ropes, elves, and sugar candy currently available in picture book format. Charlotte Voake is the illustrator of Farjeon's Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep.)

It's worth noting that in their early editions, Farjeon's two retellings are illustrated by another famous artist, Ernest H. Shepard of Winnie-the-Pooh fame.

Now, cynical modern readers might find The Glass Slipper—which was originally a play in 1944—too adorable to bear, but anyone who likes slightly old-fashioned, kinda girly books like Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess and The Secret Garden or Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes will be happy to discover this tale.

Ella is so very sweet, the Princess of Nowhere... She talks to the objects in the kitchen, and they answer. Her stepmother finds out that Ella has a little picture of her mother and uses it to keep her under control. Ella's bed in the kitchen is a sort of cupboard, so the stepmother locks her into it when the girl defies her. Here's an early encounter with Cinderella, who is wishing she could sleep in:

"Cockadoodledoo!" crowed the Rooster.
"Cockadoodledoo!" mocked Ella. "Well, I won't! Everybody orders me about, but you shan't!" And down she lay with her fingers in her ears. That seemed to finish the Rooster, and he didn't crow again. But now all round the kitchen went the funny little stir that meant the day had begun and the Things weren't being attended to. The tall clock in the corner seemed to be ticking a little more impressively than before, and Ella couldn't shut it out:

Tick-tock!
Tick-tock!
The Grandfather Clock
Agrees with the Cock!

And as it began to strike seven:

Bing-Bong!
Bing-Bong!
It's exceedingly wrong
To stay in bed long!

Ella sat up again with a little sigh. "All right Grandpa. I know. You never let me off, do you?"
"I never let anybody off," ticked the Clock.

As the Things stop fussing and Ella begins her day, her father sneaks in the kitchen door from outside, hoping for a quiet moment with his daughter before his wife catches him there. But of course, she does.

Some of this may sound a bit twee, but I have to tell you, the story unfolds so delightfully that it works. One touch I like is that Farjeon incorporates a fairy tale trope by having Cinderella help an old woman in the snowy woods. In return, the hungry girl finds a magical meal. Later the woman turns out to be her fairy grandmother.

We also get some giddily colorful characters at court, such as the king's fool (AKA the Zany) and a tenderhearted herald. Of course, Farjeon creates her own version of the dreadful and silly stepsisters:

"I'm not going to be a wallflower." The Sisters pranced about, practicing curtsies. "Nobody's not going to ask me to dance, so there!"
"Nobody's going to neglect me," said Arethusa.
"Nobody's going to reject me," said Araminta.
"I'm going to be the most beautiful bloom in the whole of the room, so there!"
"Excepting for me! People will pass the remark, 'She's just like a hothouse rose'—so there!"
Minta tossed her head. "If I don't get lots of introductions, look out for ructions!"
"If I don't get first prize for airs and graces," said Thusa, "I'll smack their great big ugly faces. I'm not going to be a wallflower.""
"No more am I not going to be a wallflower!"
"So there!" The Sisters flopped on the floor in a heap, with not a curtsy left between them.
Ella came timidly to the door. "The bath is ready, madam."
"Dip, dip, dip!" said the Stepmother.
The Sisters gathered themselves up, piled Ella's arms with towels and soap and sponges and perfume and rubber ducks, and pushed past her to the bathroom, where she had to scrub their backs for them. They were much too lazy to do it for themselves.

If The Glass Slipper is delightful, The Silver Curlew is strange and marvelous. It has a more modern sensibility than the retelling of Cinderella, almost an edge. And yet, that's a subtlety not everyone will notice. The most obvious and appealing thing about this book is its humor.

Here Farjeon combines the story of Rumpelstiltskin with a nursery rhyme about the man in the moon. Only in her version, Rumpelstiltskin (or rather Tom Tit Tot) has become a little black imp, clearly kin to devils and demons, while the miller's daughter is pretty Doll Codling, the laziest girl in all the land—but also a girl with a real knack for motherhood, when she gets the chance.

More important is Doll's younger sister Poll, who is wiry and adventurous and clever. She's the real hero of our story.

The tale's comic centerpiece is Nollekens, King of Norfolk, an overgrown child and towering sulker who clashes less-than-majestically with his new sister-in-law and nearly spoils the whole thing when it comes to naming names. His temper is a running joke that eventually offers up a tidy tidbit of a message, though not in a pompous way.

And who is Charlee, the daydreamy fisherman who wanders up and down the beach, followed by a parade of puffins? When Poll saves a beautiful silver bird from the imps of the Witching-Wood, it is Charlee who helps her figure out how to care for the injured bird. The curlew is even the subject of one of the quarrels between Poll and the king:

"I'm not featherbrained!" cried Poll, stamping her foot at him.
"You are featherbrained!" cried Noll, stamping his foot at her. "And no wonder, sitting over that silly bird of yours, morning, noon, and night. I've a good mind to have it banished."
"Don't you touch my bird! Don't you touch my bird!" squealed Poll.
"I wouldn't touch your bird with a pair of filigree sugar-tongs," said Noll.
"You haven't got a pair of filigree sugar-tongs."
"I shall have some made," said Nollekens, "especially not to touch your bird with. Nursing a sick curlew all the year round!"
"It's getting better," Poll declared.

Other passages are quietly poetic:

[Poll] unclosed her eyes, which felt a little sticky from being so fast-shut. At first the moonlight made everything swimmy and she could only see a sliding silver movement over the grass that seemed to be the wind made visible. Then as her eyes cleared Poll caught and held her breath. What did she see? She saw the Silver Curlew floating above the flower-beds like a large moth. It rose a little, dipped, rose a little higher, and slid to earth again. Poll watched its movements anxiously. It stepped through the dewy grass as though it were stepping through seaweed, and stopped beside the fountain to wet its bill. Refreshed, it began to try its wings again.

Soon the deadline for Doll's guessing the spinning creature's name comes calling, the adventure escalates, and Poll must slip into the Witching-Wood, disguised as an imp, in order to save her baby nephew.

Besides the characters, the humor, and the poet's masterful use of language, Eleanor Farjeon's greatest accomplishment is to make something new out of an old story. She even manages to twine another tale through it using a nursery rhyme. There's an artistry and a grace to The Silver Curlew that transforms it into a gift of a story for any young fantasy reader, even 50+ years after its initial publication.

While you can enjoy all kinds of fairy tale retellings in the 2000's, don't forget the earliest of these books. Sometimes they're the best of the bunch.

A Review of Little Sister and the Month Brothers by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and Margot Tomes

I almost didn't review Little Sister and the Month Brothers because it's a reprint of an old fairy tale picture book and fairy tale picture books aren't doing so well these days, but then I thought, Hmm, that's exactly why I should draw your attention to this well-crafted book by an altogether impressive classic team, Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and Margot Tomes.

Besides, this is one of the more intriguing fairy tales out there. In a nearly unrecognizable Slavic variation of the Cinderella story, Little Sister lives with her unkind stepsister and stepmother on the edge of a forest. She does all of the work inside and out, with the cruel duo treating her spitefully, besides. "All day long they hollered and they grumbled and they complained." But Little Sister is diligent, kind, and pretty, which drives her stepsister nuts. "What if a young man were to come by? He might choose Little Sister for a wife instead of the stepsister!"

So the stepsister hits on the bright idea of sending Little Sister out into the woods in the middle of winter to pick fresh violets, hoping, of course, that the girl will freeze to death and never return. (She doesn't even have a coat.)

Instead Little Sister walks on and on, then climbs up a huge rock when she sees there is a light at the top. She finds twelve "men" sitting around a fire—actually the twelve months of the year. Little Sister politely asks them if she can warm herself at their fire, and they offer to help her with her problem. As they pass the staff from January to February, then March to April, the ground around them thaws and violets bloom. Little Sister picks violets, thanks the Month Brothers, and hurries home.

Of course, her stepmother and stepsister are astonished. The next day, they send Little Sister out to pick strawberries. When she comes home with the fruit, they interrogate her about where she got them. Duly enlightened, the stepsister dresses herself in warm furs and rushes out to find the Month Brothers herself—but she is so rude that January raises a snowstorm and the stepsister doesn't come home. Neither does the stepmother, who goes out to look for her.

As for Little Sister, she stays home and takes care of the farm, eventually marrying a pleasant young farmer. And the Month Brothers quietly watch over her for the rest of her life.

In one of the more realistic pictures of fairy tale marriage, the author compares Little Sister's life with the farmer to her life with the stepmother and stepsister:

Little Sister was no longer lonely. The farmer was very fond of her, and he helped her with the work.
Sometimes the farmer hollered or grumbled or complained, but not very often.

Schenk de Regniers' text is friendly and well paced, improved by the addition of some voice bubbles—I'm not sure if she added those, or the artist did, or they worked on them together, but I like them. It didn't surprise me to learn that this author wrote for the theater, as the tale has a lightly theatrical feel. Margot Tomes's illustrations are nicely homely, with Little Sister looking like she's ten or eleven compared to the sour grown-ups she lives with. (She looks a tich older near the end of the book; it works!)

For those of you who are tired of reading the same handful of Disnified princessy fairy tales over and over, here's one your child probably hasn't heard before, and I think you'll find that the idea of the Month Brothers is particularly charming.

Note for Worried Parents: The evil stepmother and stepsister go out and apparently freeze to death, but that was exactly what they had in mind for Little Sister. In the world of the fairy tale, justice is served—which actually seems quite right to most young readers. But some of you may want to avoid the story for that reason.

12x4 Equals a Whole Lot of Dancing Princesses

There are trends, and then there's "something in the air." For example, a few years ago I thought, Hey, nobody's really written a retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses"! So I wrote one. I finished it a year and a half ago, and it's still unpublished. But as soon as I was well underway (and afterwards), not one, but three different novel-length retellings of the story came out! Each time, I worried that people would later think, like in a grade-school class, that I had "copied." I even had to change the title because one of the three came too close to mine.

This has happened to me before, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. After my picture book, The Secret-Keeper, was published, at least one blogger remarked on the similarity of my premise to the premise of The Safe-Keeper's Secret by Sharon Shinn. Sigh. I had written my story when I was 23, sold it 13 years later after some minor revision, and then, while waiting 6-1/2 years for the illustrations and publication to kick in, watched Shinn's book come out. Around the same time, Hollywood made a contemporary children's movie with a similar theme.

It's also happening with my newest manuscript to some extent. But I suppose when you set out to create a YA paranormal suspense novel in the current market and eliminate vampires, werewolves, and zombies, you're not going to be the only author to surf the next wave in the genre, one I'll loosely call psychic abilities.

So in case you were wondering, sometimes what looks like imitation truly is a handful of writers thinking, Hmm, nobody's done this yet. Call it cosmic irony, synchronicity, whatever: the lightbulb flashes on above all of their heads at the exact same time. Then two or three years later, a crop of books with certain similarities appears in your local bookstore.

Of course, I felt compelled to read the other versions of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" to see what the other three writers had done with the story. (Plus I have a couple of shelves in my library just for fairy tale retellings!) I am pleased to report that all of the books are good, each giving us a new way of looking at the original fairy tale. The first is Juliet Marillier's Wildwood Dancing (1/07), the second is Jessica Day George's Princess of the Midnight Ball (1/09), and the third, which I read a few days ago—prompting this post—is Diane Zahler's The Thirteenth Princess (2/10).

Marillier, who is best known for her adult fantasy writing, sets WILDWOOD DANCING in Romania, in a castle called Piscul Dracului. But her "princesses" are five sisters, the daughters of the wealthy merchant who now owns the castle. The girls have a magical secret—since they were very young, they've been able to slip through a hidden portal in their bedchamber to visit the world of Faerie. There they dance and befriend the odd creatures of the Other Kingdom.

When the girls are older, trouble besets them. Their father has gone away to regain his health in sunnier climes. Second oldest daughter Jena, our first-person narrator, tells how her cousin Cezar gradually takes control of the household, the business, and the family, oppressing the sisters in various ways and eventually proclaiming his determination to marry her. She is unable to get word to her father because Cezar is intercepting her letters. Cezar also casts a disdainful eye on Jena's longtime companion, a pet frog named Gogu who, it will be obvious to readers, is under some kind of a spell. Spurred on by mysterious deaths in the valley, Cezar sets out to destroy the creatures of the Other Kingdom and eliminate the portal he rightly suspects is being concealed from him by his cousins.

Meanwhile, eldest sister Tatiana has fallen in love with one of the Other Kingdom's darker denizens, a man named Sorrow who might be the vampire attacking the locals. When Tati is kept away from her love and believes she might lose him, she begins to die of a broken heart.

With the help of her sisters, the unpredictable fox-riding witch Drâguta, and her own determination, Jena is finally able to set things right, but not without a struggle. Written for teen readers, Marillier's story is beautifully crafted and a fascinating recasting of the original tale. You'll find yourself rooting for Jena and her sisters at every turn, not to mention hating Cezar, who is a terribly effective villain, as much for his sexism and bullying as for his hidden crimes.


PRINCESS OF THE MIDNIGHT BALL sticks to the original story more closely than Marillier's book. Every night, twelve princesses go to bed and are locked into their room. Every morning, their dancing shoes are worn through. In Jessica Day George's retelling, the dozen princesses are dancing in order to fulfill a contract their mother made with an evil sorcerer imprisoned beneath the earth—the heartless King Under Stone. But the sorcerer manipulated their mother, now deceased, and he has nefarious plans for the girls, who will clearly never escape his clutches...

At least, not without the help of a brave young soldier named Galen, who ends up working as an undergardener at the palace and soon develops feelings for the eldest princess. Rose is the weary, harried mother figure to her eleven younger siblings. When she falls ill, the King Under Stone has no patience with her troubles. I like that George give us a sense of how hard it would be to be one of the twelve dancing princesses of fairy tale fame: it turns out enchanted princesses don't get any sick leave.

Add in political intrigue and the ominous fates of those who try to help the princesses, and things seem to get worse by the minute. But Galen has received magical help in the form of an invisibility cloak, while his talent for knitting turns out to be surprisingly useful. As you can imagine, it's a little difficult to sort out twelve characters, a problem George solves by giving us clearer portraits of a few of them—Pansy and Poppy, for example. But this is really Rose's story, and perhaps Galen's even more so. Princess of the Midnight Ball is a warm and lively read for the 9- to 12-year-old crowd.

THE THIRTEENTH PRINCESS has a slightly younger feel than the other two books, especially as the story begins. Diane Zahler imagines a king who is increasingly angry with his wife for giving him daughters. When she dies in childbirth bearing a thirteenth daughter, he banishes the newborn to the castle kitchens in his rage. At seven, sort-of servant Zita learns that she is sister to the princesses and daughter to the king. She doesn't bemoan her lot, but she does sneak around behind her father's back befriending her lovely older siblings. Happily, the older girls are very willing to take her under their wings. Zita also befriends a stable boy named Breckin whose brother is a soldier (aha!).

It isn't until she is older that Zita starts to worry that her sisters might be under a spell. For one thing, the twelve princesses don't understand themselves why whenever suitors come to call, they are unable to speak. Thus they all remain unmarried. Then Zita's sisters begin to appear weary and sickly, and their shoes turn up with the soles worn through every morning.

With Breckin's assistance, Zita investigates her sisters' troubles; she also discovers a helpful witch living in hiding in the woods. (The king has banned magic from the kingdom, or so he thinks.) But somebody is watching Zita, and she still hasn't figured out who is behind the malevolent spells. She even worries that the king himself has done this terrible thing to his daughters.

Zahler's personable retelling offers readers a nice build-up of suspense. I like the author's vision of a castle on a lake, which starts out as a romantic gift along the lines of the Taj Majal and then literally gets moldy. Zita is an appealing main character and first-person narrator, while Breckin and the witch Babette bring freshness to the plot. Breckin further provides Zita with a younger, parallel version of the story's key romance. In fact, even the king has a romance, since the tragic history of his great love for the deceased queen influences the plot in many ways. About the only detail I found distracting is the ease with which Zita and Breckin learn to become invisible. Otherwise, Diane Zahler gives us a hopeful, magical reinvention of the story of the twelve dancing princesses—plus one.

Wildwood Dancing is probably the best of the three in terms of creativity and craft, but it is intended for a YA audience (though fine for tweens, as well). If your 3rd-7th grader is a fan of fantasy adventure in general and princess stories in particular, Princess of the Midnight Ball and The Thirteenth Princess are both excellent picks.

As we examine different versions of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," I think the upside of multiple retellings becomes clear. From a reading standpoint, it can be very satisfying to discover different takes on the same well-loved tale. Witness the many middle grade and YA versions of "Cinderella" that came out a few years back, most notably Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted. On a broader scale, it's like the way those of us who enjoy mysteries find ourselves reading numerous books in the genre, each a variation on the same classic question of "Who done it?" And of course, countless readers who've finished Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books then seek out other YA vampire series, looking to recapture if not re-envision the magic.

Picture hundreds of writers out there, feverishly tapping away on laptops in their garrets, trying to come up with stories to tell. It's often said that there are really only seven plots. For example, how many incarnations of Romeo and Juliet or star-crossed lovers can you list off the top of your head? As a very old and famous book puts it, "There is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

A justification for the manuscript sitting on my computer? Well, yes. But I find myself intrigued by the notion of storytelling as a collective endeavor, a kind of game in which we build and vary myths, sharing them back and forth among writers and readers alike the way children on playgrounds remake and pass along jump-rope rhymes year in and year out.

Note for Worried Parents: The Thirteenth Princess mentions the king's "dalliances" in his younger years and makes reference to unwed mothers among the castle servants. Some readers may also be bothered by the king's rejection of his youngest daughter, though this is later softened a bit. Wildwood Dancing is intended for teens and has a more mature tone than the other two, but contains no objectionable material other than menace from the darker creatures of the fey.

If you're a published writer who's experienced But-I-just-wrote-this-itis, please tell us about it in the comments!

Finally: This post is linked to Kidlitosphere's February Carnival of Children's Books, hosted this month by Sally Apokedak at her site, Whispers of Dawn. Link through for a set of great book reviews and more.

Update (10/8/10): And the madness continues... There are two more retellings of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" scheduled for publication now, one in 2011 and the other in 2012. An MG and a YA. I'm thinking I'll wait a few years on mine!

Update #2 (9/11/11): The two books are Heather Dixon's Entwined (Spring 2011) and Merrie Haskell's The Princess Curse (Fall 2011).

A Review of Ice by Sarah Beth Durst

I love retellings of fairy tales, and this one's a honey. It would have to be frozen honey, though—there's more snow in this book than you'll find anywhere but in a biography of Admiral Peary. Durst has taken the Scandinavian Beauty and the Beast story, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and set it in the present day, giving us a girl who lives on an Arctic research station with her gruff father and his assistants.

As a young scientist, Cassie is far from being inclined to believe in magic, though when she was little her grandmother used to tell her a seemingly fanciful story about how her missing mother was the adopted daughter of the North Wind, stolen by trolls after having bargained Cassie away to a magical bear.

Cassie thinks her father doesn't believe in fairy tales, either, but when she meets the Polar Bear King, her father panics. She realizes that her father has lied, and her grandmother's story is true. The bear returns, convincing Cassie to accompany him to his icy palace. There she learns to enjoy his company, eventually falling in love with him. (It helps that he takes the form of a man by night.)

But each will yet betray the other. In time Cassie wins her mother back, but at the price of her love. Now she must journey to the ends of the earth, fighting enemies with snarling faces, with smiling faces, and without any faces at all.

The author keeps the bones of the original tale, but uses them to build a new mythology linked to Inuit-type animal gods who preside over birthing and survival.

The original folktale, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," is a story about being willing to do anything for the sake of love. Durst's retelling amplifies that feeling, with the stakes raised because her Cassie is going to have a baby.

Durst has a gift for communicating her cold setting to the reader:

By evening, the sun was to her right. Ice crystals sparkled in a halo around the sun and in gold sheets around Cassie. The powdery mist cut visibility even more. She forced herself to concentrate on the ice in front of her. But even with all her concentration, she stumbled over invisible frozen waves. She had no depth perception in the glare of infinite whiteness. Her remaining eyelashes were icicles, framing her view of the world. Her nostril hairs had also frozen. She exhaled through her nose to keep it warmer. Her Gore-Tex pants rustled as she stumbled along. It was the only sound in the emptiness besides the huffing of the bears.

In the Arctic wilderness, Cassie encounters not only the dangers of ice and cold, but also creatures who could easily kill her. This heroine uses her knowledge of survival as well as relying on magical allies and trickster strategies to accomplish her goal of retrieving her shape-shifting mate.

It isn't easy to combine fairy tale elements with modern science, but the author makes it work, leading us smoothly through two overlapping worlds. For example, each chapter begins with latitude, longitude, and altitude. And animals such as the polar bears, while linked to the magic of their king, otherwise behave like ordinary wild creatures.

I was curious to see how the author would handle the trolls, but I should have guessed that her story's resolution would contain an intriguing twist, rounding out the unusual and moving new vision that Durst has created in Ice.

Note for Worried Parents: This is a book for teens. There's some discreetly handled sex in Ice, along with talk about birth control, pregnancy, and birth.