Pentapod reviewed While beauty slept by Elizabeth Canning Blackwell
Review of 'While beauty slept' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I'm a big fan of fairy tale retellings and re-imaginings so I picked up this version of Sleeping Beauty. Told by one of the royal maids many years after the fact to her granddaughter, it's as much the story of the maid as the sleeping beauty. It's fluffy and quick, good for beach reading, but it doesn't really have a lot of substance.
The narrator has an annoying way of recounting every event in her life with "if only I had known what terrors were to come" etc etc. Half the foreshadowing comes to nothing. The various plots and curses are confused and never well explained. The "good witch" character promises all sorts of help and teaches the maid all sorts of things which never seem to come to anything much at all. It would really have benefitted from some severe editing and plot tightening.
It was entertaining for a …
I'm a big fan of fairy tale retellings and re-imaginings so I picked up this version of Sleeping Beauty. Told by one of the royal maids many years after the fact to her granddaughter, it's as much the story of the maid as the sleeping beauty. It's fluffy and quick, good for beach reading, but it doesn't really have a lot of substance.
The narrator has an annoying way of recounting every event in her life with "if only I had known what terrors were to come" etc etc. Half the foreshadowing comes to nothing. The various plots and curses are confused and never well explained. The "good witch" character promises all sorts of help and teaches the maid all sorts of things which never seem to come to anything much at all. It would really have benefitted from some severe editing and plot tightening.
It was entertaining for a couple hours but not a book I'd ever need to read again. For a far better retelling of Sleeping Beauty I'd recommend "Beauty" by Robin McKinley or (for more adult readers) "Briar Rose" by Jane Yolen, which entwined the sleeping beauty story with the WWII holocaust.
