When I was in high school, I spent my hours mowing the lawn dreaming up fairy tales with strong heroines and wrote them for all of the school creative writing assignments. In my first one, Prince Percival (somewhat embarrassed by his name) and the princess whose name I’ve now sadly forgotten fell in love after Prince Percival fell in the fountain.
Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George In this retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, young Galen grew up in the army, his father a soldier and his mother a laundress. Now, his parents dead and the war between Westfalin and Andalusia over, the only hint he has is the name of his mother’s sister in the capital city. On the way there, he meets a mysterious old woman who gives him a cloak of invisibility and, when she sees him knitting, special balls of wool, one black, one white. He thinks she’s a little touched, but he takes them to humor her. Once in town, he discovers that his mother’s sister lives in one of the nicest houses in the nicest neighborhood in town. Her husband is the official gardener of the Queen’s Gardens, and Galen, despite his lack of experience, is taken on as an under-gardener. There, he inadvertently startles Princess Rose, the eldest of the twelve flower-named princesses, who falls into the fountain she was gazing at. The resultant illness ends up infecting all of her sisters and, since they can never take a night off from their dancing, lasts for months and becomes quite serious. Nevertheless, Rose and Galen are taken with each other. In typical romance style, the story alternates viewpoints between Galen and Rose. From Rose, we learn that they have inherited this curse from an ill-considered bargain their now-deceased mother made with the King Under Stone. Not only are the princesses being worn out with dancing, but they are being groomed as brides for the twelve sons of the King Under Stone. And they are incapable of telling anyone anything about what is happening to them. Things go from bad to worse when their desperate father declares that any prince who can solve the mystery can marry a princess of his choosing. The princesses are humiliated, but even worse, the failed princes all end up dead soon afterwards, with their grieving countries suspecting witchcraft. Even though he knows he can’t expect the promised reward for himself, Galen goes against his uncle’s wishes to try to help the princesses. Though I felt that his solution was maybe a little simplistic and some of his research was left out, it worked quite well overall. The characters were nicely sketched, the country concrete, the villains suitably creepy, the pacing good, the language lovely. The romance is squeaky clean, just enough to make middle-grade girls sigh. And did I mention that Galen knits frequently? It’s a happy for me. All in all, a very satisfying fairy tale retelling.
[ETA] This is the second book in my series of Twelve Dancing Princesses retellings. The first one was The Princess Curse.
Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .
Ivy Loves to Give by Freya Blackwood. I brought this one home from the library just on the strength of the sweet cover illustration. It’s turned out to be a favorite at our house. Ivy, who appears to be about two, loves to give, even though her presents don’t always work. Illustrations show Ivy giving her gift – a slipper to a slug, glasses to the dog – with the actual owner of the previous page’s gift looking in puzzlement for their missing belonging. Will Ivy realize her mistakes? Will there be a present for Ivy, too? The words are economical, just four sentences for the whole story, but the pictures really carry the book. They are expressive pencil and watercolor drawings, with a perfect balance of detail and lots of white space. I’ll give a shout-out to Blackwood for a rare picture book portrayal of a nursing baby. We get a glimpse of everyone in Ivy’s family, including parents, big sister, baby brother, grandma, and multiple animals, and though there is no dialog, the affection is clear. Everything fits together just so in this book. My own toddler loves to hear it over and over again, and it’s beautiful enough for me to enjoy that, too. 
Going Bovine by 
The Princess Curse by 
The Knitter’s Home Companion by 
Rampant by 
Ninja Cowboy Bear Presents: the Way of the Ninja by David Bruins. Pictures by Hilary Leung. The ninja, the cowboy, and the bear are all friends. Usually they have a great time together, but “One day, the ninja’s ways came between him and his friends. This is what happened.” There is a moral, of course – the ninja wants to play with his friends, but only his way. When they don’t want to play his extremely active, often injury-inducing way, he goes off to play by himself. You can guess the message, of course, but the telling is delightful. The language is the perfect combination of concise yet formal, giving the simple story an epic feel. The art is brightly rounded and looks digitally created, each character with a distinctive style. When the text describes the characters talking, they’ll be shown with thought or speech bubbles filled with descriptive pictures rather than text. The ninja’s has kanji alongside the beautiful Japanese-style pictures in his thought bubbles. (Transliteration and translation are both supplied on the copyright page, for those who don’t read kanji.) In this book, the ninja’s detailed half-page picture descriptions of what he’d like to do with his friends contrast vividly with his friends’ tiny black and white ideas. Small bluebirds around the edges of the page give occasional one-picture commentary on the action. In the end – hooray! – the ninja finds a way to work the action and adventure he craves into the activities his friends want to do. The only caveat that I have to give for this book is that it is not for bedtime reading. I was alone with the kiddos the evening I brought this home from the library, and kept hearing loud thunks from downstairs while I was trying to put the toddler to sleep. It transpired that my son had been inspired by the book to try great ninja leaps across the living room. Otherwise, this book is perfection. 
The Rough Guide to English Folk. According to the back copy, English folk music has been experiencing resurgence. Hooray! This disc features a wide variety of modern English folk musicians, from instrumental to vocal and from traditional interpretations to folk-rock. I had only heard of one of the artists on this album, Kathryn Tickell, whom I was fortunate enough to see live in front of, I believe, a Maddy Prior concert years ago. This album was a hit with everyone listening to it. I loved the range of songs – the foot-tapping rhythms of Kathryn Tickell’s Northumbrian pipes, the dense male harmonies, the ballads based on fairy tales and wars current and remembered. I’m going to look into getting more from Emily Portman, whose “Tongue-Tied”, a haunting ballad retelling of the tale of the Wild Swans (but with ravens instead of swans) that went through my head for days. The six-year-old boy, forced to listen to music rather than our book (the thrilling Septimus Heap book 6 – Darke), liked it after all and said it reminded him of Pennsic. And the toddler is still asking for it, and was singing the tunes even after the car was turned off. 
The Silver Bowl by Diane Stanley. Molly was only seven when her abusive father decided she was too much trouble to take care of anymore. He got her a job as a scullery maid at the castle. During their brief farewell, Molly’s room-bound mother gave her the lovely silver necklace her father had given her and told her to wear it, but keep it hidden. It’s a small link to the family heritage of seeing visions that Molly has just found out that she and her mother share. It takes some quick learning to fit in at the castle, but knowing she has nowhere else to go, Molly is motivated. She makes friends with another lowly castle employee, Tobias, the donkey boy. After a few years as a scullery maid, she is taken by Thomas, the silver master, to help with the silver polishing. There she is given the job of polishing the great silver bowl, used by the royal family for washing hands before meals. It’s filled with intricate designs, and every time Molly polishes it, it grows warm in her hands and draws her into visions. Through these she learns that the bowl is filled with curses aimed at the royal family, which the visions want her to break. As she pieces together what a person of her lowly position might be able to do about this, the plot heats up until the life of the prince and the fate of the entire kingdom are resting in her hands. This is a lovely below-the-stairs medieval fantasy, with class playing an important part. Even when Molly and Prince Alaric are put in a position where they have to talk to each other, there’s great consciousness that this is not the normal order of things. Earlier on, her efforts to stop things going wrong in the first place are seriously hampered by her position as a young serving girl, as well as her unorthodox methods of knowing things. Though this is definitely a fantasy, Molly’s visions aren’t something that anybody else in her world could be expected to believe. There’s some second-hand gore here, so while most of this is suitable for middle grade students, those highly sensitive or on the lower end of the age range might want to avoid it. The writing holds up beautifully for readers of the intended age and up – my mother snagged it off my table and finished it in two sittings.
Diaper-Free before Three by Jill Lekovic This book was for me a strange mixture of my favorite and least favorite styles of parenting books. It started off with a history of toilet training over time. She looks at literature describing when children used to be trained, advice for mothers from the Victorian era on, and studies of toilet training practices and the ages of beginning and completion from the past century. 
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