The Princess Tales Volume One, by Gail Carson Levine

[sophia_sol]

Three mid-length fairy tale retellings in one collection, all very....lightweight and silly. None of them take their own ideas seriously enough and it just results in stories that feel pointless. Some fun ideas but that's all.

The Fairy's Mistake is the story about the girls who get blessed/cursed by a fairy to have gems or toads drop from their mouths, and the cursed girl discovers how to make the best of the pests while the blessed girl is exploited for her resources. It's fun reading about Myrtle having a good time with her new powers, but I really don't like that in the end Rosella and the prince who exploits her for profit end up in a positive relationship, without any evidence that the prince has changed as a person.

The Princess Test is the princess and the pea, and it's about a commoner girl who just happens to be unusually sensitive and thus is bothered by things like peas under mattresses. She seems to both have a lot of allergies and a sensory processing disorder honestly, and possibly dypraxia too! But the story doesn't really engage with that. The story doesn't really engage with much, tbh.

Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep comes closest to working for me. A sleeping beauty retelling wherein one of the fairy gifts is to be 10x smarter than anyone else. Sonora loves learning things and loves telling people about what she's learned or figured out, but everyone finds this terribly tedious. A saying emerges in the kingdom: "Princess Sonora knows, but don't ask her." Her eventual love interest after the 100 year nap is a prince who is eternally curious about things! The two of them will clearly be very happy together. This is all great, EXCEPT that Sonora is so clearly so wrong about so many of the things she says about the way the world works, and it drives me up the wall. And I can't even tell what the author was going for with that. Is it that it's intended to be funny? Or that it's intended to reflect the supposed backwards understanding of ye olde history people? At any rate I don't like it as it feels to me like it undermines the point of the story.

Comments

[pauraque]

Sounds like a frustrating read. For years we've been talking about how you could do a retelling of The Princess and the Pea that's about a person with a sensory processing disorder, so it's a bummer that someone used the idea and didn't do much with it!

[sophia_sol]

Yeah, this book doesn't explicitly say that's what's going on in this Princess & the Pea retelling, but it's just blindingly obvious to me that that's the actual situation, and it really is a bummer because you could do MUCH more interesting things with that! I want to read that retelling now, where the author understands what they're writing and engages with the sensory processing disorder.

[mergatrude]

Oh my gosh, I had this book! I wonder if I still do, or whether I loaned it out and never got it back.

[sophia_sol]

Books do have a tendency to disappear over the years! I decided after this reread to get rid of my copy, but I'm keeping a couple of Gail Carson Levine's other books.