The Princess Blog

Tainted Beauty  by Alesha Adamson is the first book in the All That Glitters series and the last book for me to complete after receiving ARCs of every other book before I got to it. Ending with the beginning, this series has now come full circle for me. Tainted Beauty is a combined retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" and "King Midas."  Both stories are blended together equally with no bias toward one or the other. It is a sweet romance with lots of magic and dragon lore. Among the All That Glitters series, this story shares the most similarities to  Rapunzel's Gambit  by Mary Mecham , but it still stands out as a unique and original dual fairy tale adaptation. Aurelius seeks the aid of a dragon to restore his family's fortune. The ability to turn anything he touched into gold sounded like a great idea at first, until he accidentally froze his own mother in a gilded prison, turning the blessing into a curse. Soon, he realized that he was a threat to anyo...

So far, I have not read a single book by Abigail Manning that I haven't enjoyed.  Insomniac's Curse  is no exception. This "Sleeping Beauty" retelling is a creative reimagining that takes the story in a bold new direction. I have never read a book that reminded me so much of the dichotomy in the video game  Slay the Princess , which is really saying something because that game makes you think. It has lots of surprises with a hero and heroine that are easy to love. This book is a magical escape from the world we know, with a sweet romance and a few subtle references to the Disney movie. I found it a relaxing read with plenty of thrills along the way. Kaliope is an innocent maiden living in the woods, being raised by her three spinster aunts. She has a hard time sleeping at night, and for good reason. When she falls asleep, she has episodes where she loses control of her body and launches into violent attacks on the villagers. Her aunts have done their best to hide h...

Rapunzel's Gambit  by Mary Mecham is the second ARC I received from the upcoming  All That Glitters mult-author series of fairy tale retellings. Though it is meant to be a retelling of "Rapunzel,"  it has a lot more in common with a book from 1990 called Dealing with Dragons , which was about a princess who was tired of her royal duties and ran away to live with a dragon. This version of Rapunzel is feisty, aggressive, and a bit spoiled. A far cry from an innocent maiden who was kidnapped as a child, she is raised by a wealthy king and believes she can do a better job running the kingdom than him due to his overtaxation of the people. It follows many of the modern princess tropes  from recent Disney remakes . Princess Rapunzel's favorite hobby is to create trouble for everyone around her. She is a shameless flirt, a shrewd chess player, and a royal rebel. Her father is frustrated with her antics and decides to marry her off to the first person who can slay the drag...

I received a last-minute ARC for A Healing Hope  by Selina De Luca and read it over the weekend. This is the second book I have read from the Hope Ever After series , a charity author collaboration to support O.U.R. (Operation Underground Rescue) , which rescues children from exploitation and trafficking. The story supports this mission in its themes and worldbuilding. Though it is a retelling of "Rapunzel,"  it takes only the most basic elements of the fairy tale to weave a unique and original mythology similar to A Cascading Hope , the other book I've read from this series. Both of these stories take place in high fantasy worlds with complex magic systems and lore, which, though sometimes overwhelming, had a lot of love and planning put into them. This book does a particularly good job of providing hope to lost children who dream of returning home with its theming and plot. Raíza is a lost princess  trapped in a dragon-guarded tower  with a solid escape plan in mi...

As a member of the street team for the Sacrificed Hearts series , I have been eager to read these books about unexpected romance from many of my favorite authors. The series plays on the trope of sacrificial maidens  who learn that their "captors" are not what they appear to be and grow to love them. In other words, they can be interpreted as loose retellings of "Beauty and the Beast,"  one of the most beloved love stories. The first book in the series, Mountain of Dragons and Sacrifice  by Tara Grayce , is a quintessential starting point for this series. I recently reviewed Netflix's Damsel , which had a similar premise but was marred by modern agendas and stereotypes of what it means to be a princess today . In many ways, this story is the opposite of Damsel , taking a damsel who believes her life will be threatened by a fearsome dragon before learning she doesn't need physical strength to defeat it and that what is inside her heart is already enough. I wa...

A year and a half after Hulu's  The Princess , a film about a generic fairy tale princess picking up a sword and saving herself, is owned by Hulu, Neflix decided to take on their own version of the trope with  Damsel , a film about a general fairy tale princess picking up a sword and...saving herself? Though these two films share similar themes, the primary foe in Damsel  is a mythological dragon instead of a greedy conqueror, giving Netflix's take on the overdone plot more of a fantasy feel. However, the sweet taste of magic is as fleeting as the film's promise of happiness to its sacrificial brides. Like The Princess , Damsel  is a gritty action flick with little levity. I found The Princess  enjoyable enough for what it is, and Damsel , though generic, has its moments as well. The first act is particularly eye-pleasing with breathtaking imagery of castles, gowns, and indulgence in the royal life before the film's visuals and plot plummet into a dar...

The Unlucky Prince  by Deborah Grace White  is the second ARC I've received from the Once Upon a Prince series, an anthology of fairy tale adaptations by different authors from the princes' perspectives. While The Crownless Prince  was a creative gender-bent retelling of "Maid Maleen,"  this book is a basic retelling of "The Frog Prince" with no frills attached. It makes sense that the author chose to go this route since reversing the genders to have the princess turn into a frog would make the story focus more on her like in the Disney version , and it's something that has been done before . For such a short length, this book is somewhat slow and unimaginative, which was surprising coming from Deborah Grace White, who is usually a master worldbuilder . There were some references to her other books, including the dragon Rekavidur, a recurring character in most of her stories. The main character, Ari, is a minor character from Kingdom of Feathers , her ...

Kingdom of Cinders  is a "Cinderella"  retelling from Deborah Grace White's Kingdom Tales which had been on my reading list for a while. I read the first book in this series  but wasn't as impressed with it as her original fantasy books including the Vazula Chronicles and the Kyona Legacy . I have been thoroughly enjoying her newer fairy tale series, The Singer Tales , which incorporates even more original lore into these beloved tales. While this book does focus a lot on the popular fairy tale, there are some key differences that make it unique. For instance, it takes place in a kingdom where magic is illegal with a protagonist who must hide her powers from the crown. I couldn't help noticing how similar these elements were to my own original princess trilogy  which also includes a "Cinderella" retelling , but I will try to leave any personal bias out of this review. Penny never asked to be born with magic, nor did she want it. In fact, she was so ash...

"The Oracle and the Egg" Once upon a time, a young oracle named Eden lived in a thriving kingdom. Every day, people would line up at her door to tell their fortune with little regard for the toll it took on her health. Oracles lived notoriously short lives as each vision they conjured caused them to convulse with pain and slowly drain their life force. As such, Eden lost her parents at a young age and survived on her own by sharing her unique ability with the people. She was used to the pain that the visions brought and enjoyed it when she could help to prevent bad things from happening. There was one client in particular who she liked seeing most of all, and that was her kingdom's very own Prince Adam. Ever since the first prediction she made for Adam, he grew concerned with the pain that came with her power and stayed by her side holding her hand until she felt better. He often visited her just to see how she was doing without asking for any predictions. One day, Adam c...

Since I was feeling a little down this week, I decided to check out the final book in the Villain's Ever After series, Carabosse and the Spindle Spell . This book stood out to me because it sounded like such a drastic twist from the other books in the series. It's a high fantasy retelling of "Sleeping Beauty"  from the villain's perspective, but it's nothing like  Maleficent . The book turns the cold-hearted fairy into a bubbly and somewhat geeky princess whose kingdom gets caught up in a power struggle. It has shapeshifting dragons like the Love's Enchanted Tales series  and reads more like a high fantasy novella than a fairy tale retelling, which appears to be the common them among  author Sylvia Mercedes ' roster of books. No longer a scorned fairy who places a curse on a newborn princess at her Christening, Carabosse is now the princess of a magical kingdom that is protected by twelve dragon lords. Meanwhile, Aurora is the ruthless daughter of a ...

It's hard to get back into the fairy tale retelling grind after completing such a great original fantasy series . Some fairy tale retellings are unique, while others stick pretty closely to the original story. Kingdom of Beauty  by Deborah Grace White  fell somewhere in the middle. It was just similar enough to the original  "Beauty and the Beast"  that it suffered from a case of sameness after so many other retellings . That is not to say that it was bad or poorly written. In fact, it was quite good for the first book in a new series of fairy tale retellings . It's just very vanilla. Kingdom of Beauty  is about a girl named Felicity who lives with her eccentric father and brother, Ambrose. Ambrose is friends with a bully who forces his affections on Felicity no matter how much she rejects him. Though his name is Kurt, he is such a cookie-cutter archetype that it might as well have been Gaston. Every other chapter in the book switches to the perspective of Jus...

The newest Disney Princess to grace the silver screen is Raya from Raya and the Last Dragon . Since many theaters are still closed due to the pandemic, this is the second theatrical movie available to stream on Disney+ for an additional fee, the first being the live-action remake of  Mulan , which I did not think was worth the extra money for Premier Access. Raya is a worthwhile experience that recreates the magic of watching an animated Disney classic  in theaters for the first time, even though I watched it at home. It is full of magic, adventure, and heart with gorgeous visual imagery inspired by Southeast Asia. My biggest concern about this movie was that Raya would be a cookie-cutter independent warrior princess  with no personality, but I was pleased to learn that she is just as flawed and human as any other well-rounded protagonist. She share some traits with  Elena of Avalor , such as her overconfidence and trust issues but has a unique enough story to...

My friend sent me The Princess Curse  by Merrie Haskell  after letting me know that she didn't care for it quite enough to keep. Frankly, I can understand why. It fascinates me how many well-written family-friendly princess books there are out there by indie authors when a famous publisher like Harper Collins  would release a questionable book like this one through their children's market. I got the impression that the author wanted to write a princess story for adults , but the mainstream media likes to follow the misconception that anything involving fairy tales is solely for children , so they forced her to age down her protagonist and water down the story. Doing so turned the whole thing into a big mess of an adaptation suffering from a severe identity crisis. The Princess Curse  is an adaptation of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" and "Beauty and the Beast."  Right off the bat, it loses points for doing exactly what every other author who wrote an a...

This movie is a bit of an enigma. The animation is more beautiful than it has any business being, but the script feels like something that came straight out of a 1980s marketing team solely for the purpose of selling toys. And that appears to be exactly what it was . It has the look and feel of a Barbie Fairytopia movie  from a bygone era . While it's nice to know that there are still movies like this being made, would it be too much ask for them to be made better? The Fairy Princess and the Unicorn  is an extremely misleading title. The movie was not about a single fairy princess but, in fact, many winged elf princesses, most of whom were sisters. A unicorn appeared in one scene for about ten seconds and had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. The movie was apparently renamed from the more fitting title of Bayala: A Magical Adventure , which would have been a perfect fit for it. I guess their marketing team was worried that a movie named after a world no one has ever...

Back in April, I was introduced to the enchanting world of Bethany Atazadeh's Stolen Kingdom series . The first two books, The Stolen Kingdom  and The Jinni Key , told the story of two princesses and their struggles to find love and save a kingdom. I eagerly awaited The Cursed Hunter , the third book in the series, in the hopes that it would continue the story and expand the world. When I finally got the opportunity to read it, it felt like it was from a completely different series that lacked the robust setting that was teased in the first two books. This book contains a simple story that feels dry and empty despite taking place in the same world. The expansive lore of Jinnis and Meremaids is replaced by a tale of a lone woman on a boring quest. I wish I could say this book was just as engaging and emotionally provocative as the first two, but I'm afraid  The Cursed Hunter  is a different beast entirely. Bethany Atazadeh is clearly a talented author, so I'm not sure...

Dragon's Maid  was another one of the book deals I took advantage of for National Fairytale Day . It's the 9th book in a series called Love's Enchanted Tales by Kimberly A. Rogers . In't that the most princessy name for a book series ever? I was able to jump right into the story without feeling like I missed eight books worth of content, so it definitely works as a standalone. It's a romance between a human girl and a shapeshifting dragon  who takes on the form of a human man. Judging by the descriptions of the other books on Kimberly's website, most of the ones from this series are about human girls falling in love with shapeshifting dragons, so I'm not sure how much variety it has aside from each book drawing inspiration from a different fairy tale. That said, if Dragon's Maid is any indication of what the other Love's Enchanted Tales books are like, I would strongly recommend anything from this series. To say that Dragon's Maid  is a r...