The Wide-Awake Princess

Sometimes a "new" twist on an old fairy tale can feel forced or corny. Thankfully, that isn't the case with E. D. Baker's The Wide-Awake Princess, due for release May 2010.

Baker (who apparently also wrote the book Disney's newest movie "The Princess and the Frog" is based on) invites us to a land where every royal personage is blessed with magical gifts at birth in order to be talented, graceful, and most importantly, beautiful. Everyone, that is, except Princess Annie, the younger sister of Gwendolin, the most beautiful princess in all the land. Gwennie was cursed to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and sleep for 100 years, and in order to keep any curses from falling on Annie, she was given the gift of being untouched by magic, good or bad. So when the fateful day arrives and the whole castle falls asleep, Annie is the only one who can fetch Gwennie's true love to bring their kingdom back to life.

But finding a true love is easier said than done! Annie, joined by castle guard Liam travels through all the surrounding kingdoms, meeting one prince after another and sliding from one classic fairytale to the next--from gingerbread houses to ogres and transmogrified royalty--with quick wits learned from growing up without magic. With all the princes around, one of them has got to be Gwennie's true love, right?

This story is wildly entertaining, if at times a bit predictable. Even if the main plot follows the usual happy ending curve, the smaller details are still surprising and full of whimsy. And besides, we wouldn't want an unhappy ending for our heroine, who deserves a true love far more than her overly-magicked sister. My one real objection is that the final action sequence is not done well. It felt incomplete and needed to be either expanded and given more emphasis or left out entirely so as not to distract from the happy ending. And if I were to critique the author as a member or my writing group, I might comment that at times the characters seem to spend too much time explaining things to each other in rather contrived conversations. But with only a few awkward pages in a book that is otherwise truly magical, I'll forgive Baker and offer my compliments for a story well told.