The Princess Blog

This book popped up as a surprise in Aya Ling 's latest newsletter. I could not be more pleased to learn that she wrote another book along the same lines as her Unfinished Fairy Tales series , which was a guilty pleasure of mine. Both books feature girls from the real world who are transported into less-than-desirable roles in well-known fairy tales, go on a new adventure in the same setting, and live happily ever after. Enspelled  is more overtly inspired by izekai anime and manga  than the Unfinished Fairy Tales books because the main character is transported into the story of "The Goose Girl" after getting killed by a truck, which is a classic trope in modern anime. In fact, the story bears an extremely strong resemblance to an anime I watched recently called My Next Life as a Villainess . Both stories feature a girl who wakes up in the body of the villain from a story she is already familiar with after getting hit by a truck and must struggle to block all the "d...

I was so pleased to be selected as an advance reader for Aya Ling's upcoming fantasy novel, Power Born . I've been a huge fan of Aya Ling ever since reading her Unfinished Fairy Tales series about a time traveler who ends up in the world of "Cinderella"  and falls for the prince.  Power Born  is a spin-off of Aya's  Reversed Retellings series  that takes place in the same world but does not follow the same format of gender-bending popular fairy tales. Instead, it focuses on what she does best by  challenging gender stereotypes in a unique fantasy setting. Similar to the Entwined Tales series  that Aya participated in  about a bumbling fairy godfather who messed up everyone's magical gifts, Power Born  is about two siblings whose magical gifts are accidentally reversed. Chiara, who was supposed to receive the gift of beauty, got the supernatural strength that her brother, Cristian, was supposed to receive instead. What follows is a Jessic...

Aya Ling  recently released  The Cursed Prince , the third and final book in her Reversed Retellings series. Of the three fairy tales that she covered, I think the "Sleeping Beauty" fairy tale lends itself to gender-reversal the best without changing the themes of the original story because the roles of the protagonists have are not affected by their physical strength or conventional beauty stereotypes. Till Midnight , the first book in the Reversed Retellings series, changed the plot of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" by requiring the princes to battle trolls at night instead of dance at a ball, which made them more conventionally masculine. In  The Beast and the Beauty , Lady Sybil attempted to use magic, fashion, and makeup to make herself look more presentable to suitors in spite of her monstrous appearance, which are conventionally feminine things that we never saw the Beast do in "Beauty and the Beast." In contrast, the main character in "Sleep...

The Beast and the Beauty  follows up Till Midnight  as the second book in Aya Ling 's Reversed Retellings series, which reverses the gender roles from well-known fairy tales. This book was her take on the story of "Beauty and the Beast"  with a male beauty and a female beast. Though Gail Carson Levine did something similar to this with Ogre Enchanted , The Beast and the Beauty  is more of a direct translation of the romantic elements of the original story, giving the reader a better opportunity to look at how the dynamics of the characters change when their genders are reversed. A conventionally beautiful man has different problems than a conventionally beautiful woman, and the same applies to a grotesque or deformed man vs. a grotesque or deformed woman. I thought this was a very clever take on the story while still staying true to the most beloved elements of it. The Beast and the Beauty  is the story of Lady Sybil de la Roche, a rich debutant who was cur...

Since I was completely enamored with  Aya Ling 's  Unfinished Fairy Tales books, I was thrilled to learn that she would be launching a new series of fairy tale adaptations. She has quickly raised in the ranks to become one of my favorite authors. Her new Reversed Retellings books portray gender-swapped versions of classic fairy tales, presenting brand new perspectives and challenging outdated gender stereotypes. The first book in the series is Till Midnight , based on the story of  "The Twelve Dancing Princesses."  However, this version has twelve handsome princes who are forced to sneak away at night due to a curse with a female cobbler who must solve the mystery of where they go. I absolutely loved this adaptation and cannot wait for her to release more gender-swapped fairy tales. Till Midnight  tells the story of Alix, a talented young lady working as a dressmaker's apprentice in an attempt to further her career beyond the family trade of cobbling shoes...

Only a few short months after I had finished her addictive Unfinished Fairy Tales series , Aya Ling  released a surprise bonus novella called Queen of Athelia  to bring Kat's story to a full close. Even though the book is listed as the fourth in the series, it is actually the fifth, as there was another novella that took place in between the first two books called Princess of Athelia . Like that one, Queen of Athelia  takes place entirely in the kingdom of Athelia with no references to goblins or trips back to the modern world that Kat grew up in. As a result, the story is surprisingly realistic, focusing on her responsibilities as a mother and heir to the throne with her husband, Prince Edward. It felt less like a fairy tale than the others did, but Aya Ling included a tongue-in-cheek joke about that in the narrative in which Kat points out that fairy tales always end with the wedding because no one wants to hear about all of the messy non-magical things that happen afte...

When Aya Ling , the author of  A Little Mermaid  from the Entwined Tales series , placed her novel  The Ugly Stepsister  on sale, I was hoping not to get too carried away. After all, the book looks like it could easily be a watered down  Gregory Maguire wannabe . However, as soon as I began to read the first paragraph, I was instantly hooked on this wish-fulfillment fantasy. Instead of another fairy tale retelling from an alternate perspective, the Unfinished Fairy Tales series is more like a live-action princess movie , in which an ordinary girl travels to another world and transforms into a princess. Even though the series is called Unfinished Fairy Tales , the books do not tell different stories like the Four Kingdoms or Timeless Fairy Tales series. Instead, all of the books are direct sequels about the same character and the same fully fleshed out "Cinderella" world, meaning that if you got hooked on the story from the beginning like me, you will be franti...

One week after the Entwined Tales Launch Party  that I attended on Facebook, the book I was waiting for finally became available to read! A Little Mermaid  by Aya Ling  is the fifth book in the Entwined Tales series , but I cheated and read it first because I was less interested in the fairy tales that were adapted in the previous books. If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I have a very strong affinity to the story of "The Little Mermaid."   A Little Mermaid  is a very unique take on it. It has the same basic premise of the youngest mermaid princess giving up her voice for legs so that she can get closer to a human prince she rescued from drowning, but this time, Princess Clio is not in love with the prince she rescued. In fact, she deems him rather foolish for managing to fall off his own ship during his birthday celebration. Clio does, however, have a huge crush on a merman with a similar name to the human prince. Due to a misundersta...

I had a very interesting evening, celebrating the release of the Entwined Tales series on Facebook with the six lovely authors of the books from the series. I've never seen a release party quite like this before, but then, I've never seen a book series quite like this either. Each author has her own independent set of fairy tale novels, which brought them together based on their similar story content. They combined their talents to create an original series about a bumbling fairy godfather who goes around granting unwanted gifts to princesses from six different fairy tales. Some of the fairy tales they picked are rather obscure, such as "The Goose Girl" and "East of the Sun, West of the Moon,"  (which was turned into a live-action movie called The Polar Bear King  in 1991, but I wasn't a fan of it). Of course, the one I'm looking forward to the most is inspired by my favorite fairy tale , "The Little Mermaid."  Coming March 5th,  A Little...