The Worn-Out Fairy Tale

First, a little mood music (video):


Are we sitting mysteriously? Good. Let us begin.

I am issuing an immediate moratorium on the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

And no sneaking it in under other titles such as "The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes" or "The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces" or "The Princesses Who Needed to Find Themselves a New Cobbler."

Do not Google Image search this book title to find a picture for your blog. I've seen things. Things I cannot unsee. But it did remind me to wipe my browser history.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses (Or "The Shoe Fetishist's Nightmare") is a tricky fairy tale to rewrite because of the fundamental problem at the story's core.

The problem is not Jason Chan's cover. If he decided to illustrate the History of Terrible People Doing Terrible Things in Graphic Detail, I would read it.

Lady Quiz Time:

If a mysterious portal opens up in your bedroom in the middle of the night leading down to a creepy and yet symbolic underworld that looks like some Dior minimalist Christmas where twigs are made of gold, silver and there is a host of coin-operated  princes who boogie all night long, what do you an your eleven sisters do?

You can thank Moffat for making this fairy tale just a little more frightening

a) Propping the portal open with a door to make sure it doesn't close suddenly and trap your in the sinister underworld, take a peek into the mysterious wonderland to make sure you haven't stumbled into an episode of Doctor Who and/or survey the area for Mr. Tumnus (and we are talking only James MacAvoy's Mr. Tumnus)

Accept no substitutes

B) Leaving one sister to hold the door, pop down with a wheelbarrow and some servants and haul back as many gold, silver and diamond branches as you can snap off. There are twelve of you. You could clean up enough to install a proper security system and team of exorcists in the next castle you buy.

C) Wander past the priceless fancy trees, take a boat to a castle that is built entirely around a lake that is somehow underneath your own castle and then dance the night away with princes who, so far as I can tell, are robots. Dance so hard that your shoes are in tatters and then walk home past the fancy trees into your beds. Don't tell anyone about this but instead play a risky game of "discover my secret nighttime activities" with a grizzled old dude who you will be forced to marry because you are in a fairy tale.

D) Move. Pack up your things and move.

This is not a difficult quiz

Each of these authors tries to make the less-obvious choice of C seem a little less crazy. Some succeed (The Thirteenth Princess they are under a spell, The Princess Curse they have kind of put their immortal souls in danger due to having not read enough fairy tales) and some don't (In Entwined they are angry at their dad: I know what will show him! Making him pay out more money for shoes!).

None of these really thwacked it out of the park for me. I will give The Princess Curse a slight edge as it veered off somewhere unexpected and new halfway through the book (Did anyone else think that Entwined would have been a stronger middle school book? For a 480 page book, it didn't have enough complexity to be YA).  

Let's put the dancing princesses to rest. They've had a long night.

In which Ari is a model of restraint

Every year, Vancouver treasure Kidsbooks has a 20% sale. Usually this is a dangerous time for bibliophiles: 20% off is a perfect excuse to extravagantly overspend on our book budget. One protects oneself from this by taking allies (in this case my friend Jen); people who don't think it's at all strange to want to spend an hour in a bookstore. Unfortunately anybody who wants to go shopping with you at a bookstore dedicated to children's and YA literature is probably similarly vulnerable to temptation.

But I escaped with only a reasonable number of books this year. (And then I went and spent too much money at the yarn shop, but that's neither here nor there.)

Two were replacements, or already-reads that I'd been meaning to actually own for a while. the first was Enchanted Glass, by Diana Wynne Jones. You've probably read this (if you haven't, you should), but if you haven't, I'll just tell you that this is a lovely, comfortable little book, pleasant and well-rounded and rich, and that the reason I didn't already own it is because the Canadian edition took a while to come out in paperback, and also the American edition had one of the worst covers I have ever seen. This is the Canadian cover. Isn't it nice? Enchanted Glass is about Andrew Hope, who inherits his grandfather's house. Surprise: his grandfather was probably a wizard. Full of fairy tales and folk tales and family secrets and friendly monsters and walks in the woods. Delightful.

The second already-read was one of my favourite books of all time: From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg, in which Claudia and her brother Jamie run away from home and move into The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. There they stumble upon a mystery/conspiracy about a priceless work of art. I cannot emphasize this enough: this book is amazing, and everyone should read it. Twice. Or so many times that you lose count, and the spine cracks, and the pages fall out, as probably happened with my copy (before my cousin, who was obsessed with this book at the same time that I was, probably stole it). And I'm not just saying that because running away from home to live in a museum was something that eight-year-old me seriously considered on multiple occasions, totally independent of the influence of this awesome, awesome book.

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. I picked this one up mainly because our good friend and fellow reviewer Pippa liked it so much, despite Miss Corene's lukewarm feelings about it. It's about an American teenager who goes to boarding school in London, and apparently there's a mystery. I am told that the cover is misleading and that there is in fact no Victorian murder mystery, as it takes place in present day? So far it's... good? I think? Apparently we're going to be talking about it on next week's podcast, so we'll see.

The Grimm Legacy, by Polly Shulman, which Jen made me buy. Okay, she didn't exactly twist my arm: apparently this book is about library pages going on adventures and fighting evil. Basically. More details when I've read it, but with an endorsement like that, come on. What choice did I have? After all, Jen was the one who made me buy Graceling, so I think we can all agree that her judgment is pretty sound in these matters.

I, Coriander by Sally Gardner. All I know for certain about this book is that it takes place in 17th-century London, that the main character's name is Coriander, that there are magic shoes involved somewhere, and that at some point she gets locked in a trunk and left to die.

Also she's ginger. I think. Often that's enough for me, so maybe let's wait until I've actually read the book.