by Merrie Haskell
Grade: 3 1/2 stars
Story summary: Half "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" and half "Beauty and the Beast", with a dash of the story of Hades and Persephone thrown in for good measure.
Thoughts: I am four reviews behind, so point form it is:
--Nice complexity for some of the characters, especially the Princess whose name I've forgotten and the really handsome boy whose name I've also forgotten. (Yeah...I have a bad memory, and I don't have book on hand right now.) The "Beast" or Hades character was not as blameless as he tends to be, either, though still on the side of Good.
--I seem to have read quite a few books with feisty 12-year-old fantasy heroines recently, the best being Kat, Incorrigible, Ordinary Magic, and this one. Reveka is a great addition, with her interest in herblore so passionate that she was willing to give up marriage and a family to become a nun and study it for the rest of her life.
--Speaking of which, it was immensely refreshing to have a recently-written character who actually wanted to be a nun (though nuns weren't exactly portrayed well...). Many people seem to completely misunderstand the place the religious had in the middle ages--being a religious was actually rather freeing for women. Like the awesome Hildegard of Bingen, who was mentioned several times in this book, and was recently canonized (yay!).
--It was good and worth reading, and the take on Beauty and the Beast was rather unusual. And I have nothing else to say because, as I mentioned, I'm four reviews behind.
P.S. My favourite cover illustrator Jason Chan again! Sooo pretty.
"RED is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love." -G. K. Chesterton
2 comments:
I read this awhile ago and so don't remember it distinctly, but my general impression is that it was a good story--but I wished Reveka had been a little older. Also, I'm hoping for a sequel, though I haven't heard anything about that.
Yes, considering she got MARRIED, 12 was a little young. But I thought it wasn't too bad, as she ended up going back to the normal world for several years to grow up first. A sequel would be great, and she'd be older by that point too. But I haven't heard anything about that either.
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