Once Upon a Time — (2002-2008) Young adult. These are retellings of classic fairy tales: The Arabian Nights, Sleeping Beauty, The Magic Flute, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, The Ballad of Mulan, The Snow Queen. Find more at our Nancy Holder page.
  
   
 Beauty Sleep: "Keep What You Hold in your Heart..."
The Once Upon a Time books are short but sweet retellings of old fairytales, written with the general plot of the original story in mind, but in such a way that there are a few surprises along the way (often the story is told in a contemporary setting that has no magical elements, or contains a twist on who the heroine eventually falls in love with). For their target audience they are a treat, and for everyone else, they are a pleasant way to kill a couple of hours.
Out of all the authors commissioned to add their retellings to the series, Cameron Dokey, the author of Belle, Before Midnight and Golden, is probably the best (or at least, my personal favourite). There's something unique about Dokey's ideas concerning the source material and the way in which she tells her stories that puts her contributions at the top of the pile.
When Aurore is born a great celebration is held in honour of her Christening, only for things to go very wrong when she's cursed to prick her finger at the age of sixteen and sleep for one hundred years. Naturally, her parents are extremely protective of her, though her cousin Oswald — the regent to the throne, whose motives are ambiguous — eventually talks them into letting her explore the world outside the castle, arguing that she would be more prepared to face whatever trials come upon her if she's given life experience.
As her sixteenth birthday approaches, it would seem that Oswald's plan has worked a little too well. Because Aurore is destined to fall into a one hundred year sleep, the magic in the land causes chaos when this in fact does not happen. Concerned for the wellbeing of her people, though dreading the thought of the curse's fulfillment, Aurore decides to enter the mysterious forest that fringes the kingdom in the hopes of finding an answer there, only to find a young prince who claims to be on the way to the centre of the forest — where a sleeping princess is said to wait for true love's kiss.
I was intrigued by how Dokey was going to tackle the one-hundred years sleep considering that there's nothing more boring than watching a person sleep, but she manages to come up with an extremely clever (and poignant) way of granting the passage of time without Aurore losing consciousness. I'm not a huge fan of first-person narrative, but Dokey keeps Aurore's voice brisk and chatty, and captures both her underlying dread of sleeping for one hundred years and the general personality traits of impatience, intuition and altruism.
Dokey is also good at creating the atmosphere of a fairytale, such as the warmth of the villagers; the cold intrigues of the court; and the beauty of the forest, filled with mysterious cottages, winding hedge mazes, and a valley of apple trees arranged to form a pattern. As she did in Belle, Dokey has a knack for describing the natural world tinged with enchantment; and a definition of this world's magic and its effect on Aurore's curse provides food for thought.
A couple of plot points are raised only to go nowhere (such as the two fairies that cast the spell in the first place, as well as a young woman who approaches Oswald with hints that her family can benefit his ambition) but on the whole Beauty Sleep hangs together nicely, with some very good ideas at work, and a surprising end in regards to where Aurore's heart truly lies.
Although the Once Upon a Time novels are largely forgettable and (with the exception of K.Y. Craft's stunning cover art) somewhat cheap in both price and quality (the amount of typos you'll find in any given edition indicates that only a rudimentary edit was given to each one), it seems pointless to give them a low rating when their purpose is to simply entertain. And entertaining they are. —Rebecca Fisher
Before Midnight: "She Has the Look of Her Mother..."
Cameron Dokey's contributions to the Once Upon a Time series are undoubtedly the finest, but her retelling of Cinderella is initially a little hit and miss. The series as a whole involves writers taking a recognizable fairytale and tweaking it a little into something that is still familiar but which provides a different point of view. This can involve changing the setting or the time period, removing all the magical elements that make up the original tale, or simply fleshing out the characterization.
Dokey takes all three approaches in her take on Cinderella, setting it in an unspecified time and place (though everyone has French names) and expanding more on our heroine's relationship with her father and step-family. Born to Etienne de Brabant and Constanze d'Este, Cinderella is here named Cendrillon, and her birth is the reason for her mother's death. Shunned by her father, Cendrillon is raised by her elderly nursemaid alongside a foundling that her father brings home a few days after her birth: a dark-haired youth named Raoul who takes up a job as a gardener.
Cendrillon and Raoul are as close as siblings growing up, though both harbor wishes that they'll one day have a proper family: that Cendrillon will earn the love and acceptance of her father, and that Raoul will find out who his parents are and where he came from. Neither wish seems likely to come true, and the plot thickens when Cendrillon is introduced to a new step-family right around the same time that political intrigues in the kingdom grow more tense. Believed to be a simple serving girl by Chantel de Saint-Andre and her daughters Anastasia and Amelie, Cendrillon is contented enough to be treated as one, until circumstances become impossible for her to hide her identity any longer...
Books in the Once Upon a Time series are not particularly good books by anyone's standards, but then they're not pretending to be. They provide quick, light entertainment, and a new twist on your favorite old fairytales. Like candy floss at the fair, they're cheap and colorful, but don't have a particularly long lifespan. It goes without saying that these books do not contain mastery over plot, character and language.
For instance, chapter one of Before Midnight informs us that a mysterious wind extinguishes all the fires in the household, only for the nursemaid to take the newborn Cendrillon down to the still-burning kitchen fireplace to warm her a few pages later. The word "wish" is used excessively, as either a noun or a verb (I kept count; at one stage it's repeated twelve times in nine paragraphs), and Dokey seems to have something important to say about the subject, though I have no idea what save that wishing is Very Serious Business.
At times the circumstances and language borders on Gothic melodrama: everyone talks portentously, lightning strikes and destroys the tree that grows over Constanz's grave, pumpkins are used as an analogy for mourning, Cendrillon's eyes are described as being "green as asparagus" and there's love at first sight for almost everyone involved.
Yet we get onto firmer ground with the introduction of Cendrillon's step-family. Dokey's treatment of Chantel, Anastasia and Amelie is intriguing considering that none of them are presented as the villains. Chantel has been forced into a political marriage with Cendrillon's father, and bears no grudges toward her stepdaughter (in fact, for a long time she doesn't even realize that she has a stepdaughter), and the youngest, Amelie, soon comes to love the estate. Anastasia is initially the shrewish sister, but even she is revealed to have hidden depths when a secret love affair comes to light. Rather, it is Cendrillon's father who is presented as the unfeeling adult, along with another biological parent who remains off-screen for the entire book. Portraying Cendrillon's stepfamily as a sympathetic unit that eventually forms a strong bond with the heroine is probably the greatest contribution Dokey makes to the story, and it's certainly more poignant and real than her eventual romance.
As with all the books in the series, Before Midnight is a quick read that provides a new perspective on an old fairytale, and in a trait that is unique to Dokey, she keeps you guessing as to whom the main character is eventually going to fall in love with.
One pet peeve of mine that pertains to the series as a whole is that the once-beautiful cover art done by K.Y. Craft, portraying the bodice of the protagonist and several details from the fairytales, has since been replaced with generic beauties in big frocks. Lame. The girl on the cover of Before Midnight doesn't even resemble the character as she's described in the books, and though one is not supposed to judge a book by their cover, the evocative art of the original bindings was certainly more appealing than the reprints.
—Rebecca Fisher
 Belle: "The Petals Always Remained True and Never Faded..."
The Once Upon a Time books are a series of relatively slim volumes that retell traditional fairytales, usually in an updated setting. Water Song: A Retelling of "The Frog Prince"
for example is set during WWII, and with the magical elements removed. Belle is an exception to this rule, as it is set in your typical 19th century time-period and with plenty of emphasis on enchantment and mystery in its second half.
Other reviewers have compared Belle with Robin McKinley's Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast. This is inevitable really since her version is probably the most famous rendition of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale (save for the Disney movie, of course). It is a little unfair though to compare the two considering both authors have based their stories on the French fairytale "Le Belle et le Bette" by Charles Perrault, and any similarities are the result of their fidelity to this source material, and not an attempt at plagiarism (and Dokey manages to get in a few of her own original ideas).
However, as fate would have it, I recently read and reviewed McKinley's version, and so inevitably comparisons do arise when reading the two of them back-to-back. And yet for various reasons Beauty did not rank very highly with me (often it felt a bit padded in all the wrong places), and so I was interested to see what a new author could do with the same story and a lower page-count.
Like McKinley's Beauty, the title character is not as beautiful as her name would suggest, and she's constantly compared to her stunning elder sisters who (unlike their counterparts in Perrault's tale) are not spoilt and selfish at all, but loving and affectionate toward Belle. However, whereas McKinley's Hope and Grace were virtually indistinguishable, Dokey's Celeste and April both have distinct personalities and relationships with their sister. In fact, Dokey puts a huge amount of emphasis on Belle's family, including her mother (possibly the first version in which she's still alive), her father, and her foster grandfather "Grand-Pere LeGrand."
Belle is constantly overshadowed by her sisters, but finds solace in her wood-working skills. Since she was a child, Belle has been able to "feel" what a piece of wood desires to be carved into, and whittles away at it accordingly. But when her father's merchant ships are lost and her sister's love goes missing at sea (the only echo of Beauty that feels uncomfortable, as I'm fairly certain that this lost-at-sea fiancée plot was McKinley's original invention) the family must relocate to a country house near a mysterious woods. When her father returns home after a business trip, he takes a detour in the woods and finds a castle...and yet foolishly takes something from its garden that does not belong to him, resulting in his youngest daughter being the price for his freedom.
This "something" is not the traditional red-rose, but the bough of a vaguely magical tree called the Heartwood Tree, which has its own sad history concerning a pair of lovers who were separated by death. Another interesting variation is that the Beast does not propose to Belle every night, but rather challenges her to look into his eyes for five seconds, for "that is how quickly a life may change, for better or for ill. The time it takes to make up, or change your mind."
There are also some lovely images here, such as the Heartwood Tree that blooms red and white flowers, which mingle into a pink tapestry of petals on the ground, or the various gates and doorways of the castle that are decorated with the images of a man and a woman: when they are closed, their outstretched hands are joined; when they are opened, they are parted.
However, there are just as many concepts that feel messy or convoluted. Apparently Belle is so eclipsed by her sisters' extraordinary beauty that no one can see her when she stands between them. That's...a bit weird. Furthermore, the heart of any "Beauty and the Beast" retelling should always be the relationship between the two title characters (I mean, duh, right?) Unfortunately, we are well over halfway through the book (chapter eighteen out of twenty-three) before we finally get to meet the Beast, and the impending romance feels rushed as a result. There is some rather shaky commentary on concepts like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "the face of true love", but these are ideas that are mentioned rather than explored, resulting in messages like this: "to find true love, you must look with love's eyes." Er...thanks book. That's real helpful.
If you're going to retell a fairytale, there should be something new to say, something that makes you look at the story in a different way. I'm just not sure that's achieved here, though naturally that will differ for different readers. These books have never pretended to be anything but quick and breezy reads. Two stars may seem like a low grade, but in my book it ranks as "fair." While it lasted, I enjoyed Belle, though it's certainly not the best Dokey retelling in the Once Upon a Time collection. —Rebecca Fisher
The Wild Orchid
The Once Upon a Time series takes traditional fairytales and gives them a new spin, either by rationalizing the magical elements (as in Snow) or by setting them in a more contemporary time period (such as Water Song). They make for short but sweet little reads; like Hershey's Chocolate Drops, they're hardly anything to get too excited over, but can provide a new point-of-view to stories you've been hearing since you were a child. Cameron Dokey is perhaps the most popular contributor to the series, and her titles are amongst the best installments, including The Storyteller’s Daughter, Beauty Sleep, and Before Midnight.
Wild Orchid is based on "The Ballad of Mulan," which (along with Sunlight and Shadow, a retelling of “The Magic Flute,” and Spirited, the second version of “Beauty and the Beast” in this series) suggests that the authors are running out of material. Not exactly a "fairytale," the legend of Mulan is probably best known to Western audiences through the Disney film adaptation. So it was with some interest that I picked up Wild Orchid, knowing little about the source material and interested in how the story would play out.
Hua Mulan is a young Chinese girl who has been taught the ways of warfare by her best friend and neighbor Li Po. Left mainly to her own devices thanks to her long-absent father, Mulan grows up acutely aware of how different she is from other young women (told in first-person narrative, she spends most of the first chapter driving this point home to us). When her general father eventually returns home she is eager to get to know him, partly because she longs to learn more about her mother, whom her father married for love and whose name has not been uttered since Mulan's birth.
But China is under threat from the Huns, and when Mulan's father finally returns home she is concerned about his health, not to mention the condition of his new wife. Deciding not to risk his death in battle, or to split up the newlyweds, Mulan disguises herself as a boy and rides out to join the army in his place. By the time this occurs, we are already halfway through the book, and Mulan's experiences in the army seem rather rushed as a result. Meeting the youngest son of the Emperor, Prince Jian, Mulan eventually proves herself (to friends, family and love interests alike) in a satisfying though rather predictable way.
At times Mulan does come across as something of a Mary Sue, what with her tenacity, determination and ability to do absolutely anything, including come up with war strategies that nobody else can think of, beat the prince himself in archery practice, and be universally adored by everyone she meets. Still, when you think of the original ballad, in which the titular character bests her father in a sword fight, goes unrecognized for years whilst fighting in the army, and who is applauded for her efforts when the truth finally comes out, the character’s abilities have actually been toned down!
Dokey is usually quite good with the first-person narrative voice, but here it grates slightly thanks to Mulan's Western-style diction and her incessant pondering over how different she is from everyone else. Considering her differences also make her indisputably better than everyone else, I'm not sure why she's complaining. Likewise, Mulan's romance with Prince Jian is completely unconvincing, though the two of them do manage to secure their future together in a rather touching way. That being said, this is one of the few books in this series that I wished had a higher page count, just to give us more details on the characters and situations.
There are some interesting differences here when compared to the Disney version; Dokey correctly uses "Hua" as Mulan's family name (instead of Fa, as in the movie) and correctly translates Mulan's given name as "wood orchid" (whereas the Disney film seemed to suggest it had something to do with blossoms). But the unique thing about Wild Orchid is that it is not a "retelling" of the ballad, but simply a fleshed-out version of it. As such, it's difficult to really place it within the "fairytale" canon of the other books in the series, though as always it serves as a mild, diverting read that sheds new light on an old tale. As always, Dokey serves up a strong and rewarding story. —Rebecca Fisher |
links. Or donate.
