Disney Princess Beginnings: Cinderella and Belle

Disney Princess Beginnings is a new chapter book series for Disney lovers in the vein of the Disney Fairies series and previous princess series.

The books are written for a slightly younger crowd than both the previous series, but they're still plenty enjoyable for adult fans.

Cinderella's book has her participating in her town's puppet show to win a gold coin so she can buy a dress. She's having trouble with her designs and meets a local girl who works with her mother on a grumpy man's farm, taking care of his animals. She's hoping to use the prize coin to buy a goat, so she and her mother can eventually buy their own farm. Cinderella teams up with Val, offering space for Val to work in exchange for Val teaching her more about sewing and puppet construction. Both girls end up putting on a great show, but who will win and can that girl enjoy the prize when she knows how badly her friend wants to win?

The book is quite cute, but also bittersweet, because Cinderella's mother is a central character, and you see how happy their little family is. Knowing what's in store for Cinderella, it's a bit sad to read. I did rather like how they made Cinderella a nickname her parents gave her, not another instrument of abuse from her steps. Her real name, predictably, is Ella. It was a good way to work in the use of the recognizable name.

Belle's book was even better than Cinderella's, I think. Belle is having trouble fitting in when she's a young girl. The triplets from the movie and another little girl in Belle's class all have dolls, so Belle finally gets one, only to carve her ears into fairy's ears, paint her purple and attach some wings to her back. The other kids make fun of Belle's doll, but she still keeps bringing her to school anyway. Belle tries to fit in with her classmates and ends up going into an old bookshop everyone thought was abandoned. There she meets the owner and becomes enchanted with the shop and with reading, even more than she already was. But Belle soon learns the shop is going to be sold. Can she figure out a way to make the town fall in love with it like she has?

Belle's story was much easier for me to read than Cinderella's, because the family situation is already like it was in the movie. Her mother passed away when she was very little, so she isn't a presence. Also, I just really love Belle.

The illustrations in these books are absolutely gorgeous, as they always are in Disney chapter books. I'm very excited for future books and disappointed this is the only time we'll get multiple books at once! Ariel's comes out in July and she and two sisters end up swept out to sea by a huge wave. I can't wait to see which two sisters it is, because I'm a huge fan of the daughters of Triton.

DEAR AMERICA: Clotee

I swear, Clotee has more images for her one book than any other Dear America! I'm trying to fit them all in here and not just have a bunch of pictures and no words!

A Picture of Freedom is one of the most well-known Dear America books. It's the story of a young slave girl who learns to read and write while fanning the master's son.

Clotee is a captivating character and she's surrounded by an equally strong cast. I love Spicy and I always wanted her to go more in depth on her own story. I would have loved for Missy to get more of a comeuppance, too. And I always felt Hince got off a little too lightly, too, considering his betrayal in the end. Clotee's smart thinking got them out of it, but he never should have done it and there should have been more words about it.

Being such a staple for the series, Clotee was of course chosen to be part of the reboot. Her new artwork is very pretty, but I prefer the picture used for the original book.













Clotee's book was one of the few used by the UK version of Dear America, called My Story. I think they could have tried a little harder at finding a title though! "Slave Girl" is just plain bad on its own, but it's exceptionally poor compared with the poignancy of "A Picture of Freedom" and how that title ties in with the story. There is a photograph cover also shown for the My Story version, but I'm not going to place it here, as it takes up too much space. It's hard to say a lot about a book as good as this and I don't like to post entries that are all pictures with no words beside.

Clotee's story was one of the ones chosen to be filmed for HBO, although I can't remember if I've seen it or not. I want to say yes, but I'm not sure. 

Clotee was also in the sadly unproduced second wave of Madame Alexander Dear America dolls. Considering her book was fourth in the series, I feel she should have gotten a space in the initial lineup in place of Margaret Ann Brady (the Titanic girl) or even my fave Caty, as both of their books came afterwards. Mem's a Mayflower girl and Abigail is Revolutionary War, but Clotee should have been there, too, instead of one of the others. 

Her doll is really cute, too, although definitely not accurate to the story. She never had that elaborate an outfit and her doll in the story was a small wooden carving. 

Clotee's book is definitely a must read for the Dear America series. 

ROYAL DIARIES: Kazunomiya

In 2004, Kathryn Lasky wrote about Kazunomiya, taking us to Japan. Japanese culture has always fascinated me, so I enjoyed reading this a lot, even though it is rather short and I feel she could have expanded on much more.

Sadly, she crafts a story that leaves one rather large loose end. She fabricates a romance between Kazunomiya and her original betrothed, only to have her marry another. This part we all saw coming, but in the epilogue, it's stated that it's unknown if she ever saw the man she actually loved again. In history, she was widowed after only a handful of years of marriage and took vows as a Buddhist nun afterward. If she had some great love from before, why not see what he's up to? Maybe that's a no no in historical Japanese culture, I dunno, but they could have at least met up again. So the crafted love story doesn't really work with her history.

Also, I think a lot of little details could have been expanded upon, too. There's a lot of court intrigue, but you don't get a really clear sense of how the Japanese imperial court works, because Kazunomiya shuns much of it, due to the poor treatment of her mother. Little things, too. She spends a lot of time talking about clothing and how you can only wear certain colors during certain seasons, but she describes colors by saying the names of things from nature instead of using color words. I don't know what color a frickin' plum blossom is. I had to look it up.

Lasky has done some excellent work for Royal Diaries, but I think this one falls in the middle. I did still enjoy it, but mostly because I like the culture it's set during, which manages to balance out the writing failures.

There are only two remaining Royal Dairies to be reviewed: Kaiulani and Anastasia. I'm always sad when I get to this point, because I love the royal series a lot. And now I'm going to be mired in the Civil War for awhile. *groan*

6 CHELSEA WALK Series

This series doesn't have a set title. On Amazon, it appears to be called the Historical House series, but I prefer to call it 6 Chelsea Walk. The series is six books that are set in the same building during six different time periods. It was originally a trilogy, then expanded into six. Three authors contributed two books apiece.

It begins with Ann Turnbull's Mary Ann and Miss Mozart, set in 1764 when the five story house is a boarding school for girls. Lizzie's Wish by Adele Geras jumps forward to 1857, when the building is now a family home with a protagonist who wants to be a gardener. A bit odd for a female back then! Cecily's Portrait, also by Geras, is set in 1895 with a girl getting to know the female photographer that lives in another house. Cecily, the daughter of the baby born in Lizzie's Wish, is Lizzie's niece and she makes an appearance near the end. Cecily, like Lizzie, has unusual ambitions in wanting to become a photographer. Linda Newbery's Polly's March is set in 1914 and about suffragettes. Turnbull's Josie Under Fire takes place in 1941 and deals with WWII. Andie's Moon by Newbery ends the series. It's set in 1969 and the protagonist wants to be an artist.

Each author does a good job with her pair of books and it's interesting to see the house in different incarnations, from school to family home to eventually a set of three apartments. There are some connections between the characters, but I wish they'd touched on that a little bit more. Mary Ann disappears from history, though her lost ticket is found later on. Lizzie and Cecily have their link, and a character who first appears in Polly's March is a presence in every book after.  

My favorite of the series is Andie's Moon, because I've read so little historical fiction from this era.

ROTTEN APPLE Series

The Rotten Apple series is just like the Poison Apple one except the supernatural threats are specifically zombies.

I'm not a big fan of zombie stuff, so these left me a bit bored. How each different author makes the zombies work for tween books is probably the most interesting part. Mean Ghouls is the best of the four, mostly because I really like the character of Happy. I like Lily from Drop Dead Gorgeous, too. Zombie Dog is a bit sad, if you're a dog lover. Dawn of the Dead I couldn't get into at all and the ending...just no.

I'm going to stick this set into storage in the same box as my Candy Apple and Poison Apple books, but I wouldn't be surprised if I decided to sell it eventually.

POISON APPLE Series

The Poison Apple series is a supernatural companion to the Candy Apple series. Young tween/early teen girls are the protagonists and they face a variety of supernatural mysteries from ghosts to vampires to werewolves. The first eight books came out from May 2010-November 2011. The first two Rotten Apple books, also supernatural but with a zombie theme, came out in August 2012. Unbeknownst to me, Poison Apple also returned with The Ghoul Next Door in October 2012 and The Ghost of Christmas Past in November. The Green-Eyed Monster followed in January 2013, but the twelfth book, Dead in the Water, didn't release until April 2014. September 2014 brought the third anf fourth Rotten Apple books, which I think are the last of this oddly stretched out run of Candy Apple spinoffs.

Spoilers below! Since these books are mysteries, if you plan on reading any and want to avoid spoilers, stop reading here.

I'll talk about Rotten Apple in a separate post, because I haven't started them yet. I just finished the twelfth Poison Apple. Mostly, I enjoyed these stories. Some of them are typical ghost stories, like The Dead End, Curiosity Killed the Cat, and The Ghost of Christmas Past. I think Christmas Past is the best of the trio, because the prank-loving ghost was a bit different, although I really enjoyed Curiosity, too. This Totally Bites and At First Bite are companions of sorts. The first follows a girl who's convinced she's a vampire, but she turns out not to be, and it's the popular spoiled girl in her class who actually is. At First Bite picks up with the popular girl dealing with her newly-acquired vampire status, a move across the country, and a mystery involving a "Dark" vampire who actually preys on humans. Both of these are good. I prefer the storyline of the second, but the protagonist of the first. Miss Fortune is interesting, because it's a bad luck curse, but the story is kinda boring. Bad luck mishaps kinda bore me, I guess. Now You See Me is another ghost story, but it's centered around a haunted camera and it's very well-written. The characters are all engaging. It was easily my favorite of the first eight books when I read them the first time and it still is. Midnight Howl is werewolves and Her Evil Twin is unique because the girl is being haunted by her old imaginary friend, not an actual ghost. The Ghoul Next Door feels like a ghost story, but it's actually out of body experience, so that made it work better. I liked that one a lot. The Green-Eyed Monster is a possessed necklace from the Salem Witch Trials days. It's pretty good. Dead in the Water, the twelfth book, blows all the others away though. It's got a very different theme based on Norwegian folklore and that really makes it stand out. Definitely my favorite of the entire series.

If you're looking for some fun supernatural mysteries that actually ARE supernatural and not just explained away, check these out.

Andrew Lang Fairy Books

Andrew Lang's twelve "color" fairy books are some of the most well-known fairy tale anthologies in the world. Lang collected tales from more sources than almost anyone else and many of the stories appear for the first time in English in his collections, translated by his wife and others.

The books were aimed at children, so these aren't the darkest, grittiest versions of the stories. However, as they range in original publication from 1889-1910, expect terms that were used in those times to be present.

I've been reading these books for years and am finally one away from having all twelve. They're not something I pursue actively, having had many of them sitting in my "to read" pile for years. I read the first four quickly, but the fifth is the one I'm still missing, and I got only partway through the next volume I'd picked up before putting them down and not picking them up again until today.

I received the Crimson and Brown books from Paperback Swap today, so I decided to finally get these books read! This is one of the few reviews you'll see on here that happens when I haven't even finished all the books, but I've read enough of these that I can praise the range of tales and the gorgeous illustrations. If you're a fairy tale fan, you should be reading these.

And if you want to read them in order, though you don't have to, the order of publication is: Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive and Lilac.

Lang also wrote many other anthologies, but these are the first ones I'm tackling. Maybe I'll do others eventually, but maybe not.