Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep: A Review

Hello, my lovelies!

Back for Book Three! (Read the reviews for books One and Two)

Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep by Gail Carson Levine

3.5 Stars

A spiteful fairy. A beautiful princess. An outstretched finger. A spindle. A hundred-year snooze. A charming prince. A kiss. All the familiar ingredients.

But wait! Where did that extra prince come from? And those fairy gifts that were never there before? And what does a flock of balding sheep have to do with anything?

Gail Carson Levine has waved her magic wand over the old standby of "Sleeping Beauty" and presto! It reappears, transformed, sparkling and hilarious. Chuckles and giggles are guaranteed.

~From Amazon

I’m not going to lie, this one was harder to get through than the others- perhaps because I started reading it immediately after The Princess Test, which I enjoyed immensely.

But after getting through some rough patches at the beginning (which I’ll talk about later) I actually really started to enjoy this one. It certainly didn’t threaten Book Two’s spot as my favorite but is by no means a bad book.

What I Liked:

This was one interesting story. The author delves into things I’ve never seen before in a Sleeping Beauty retelling and explores themes I was really excited to find.

Sonora (our Sleeping Beauty) is cursed at birth to prick her finger on the spindle and die. She had been given the gift of being ten times smarter than everyone else earlier that day and so even though she’s still a baby she is fully aware of what’s going on when this happens. The fairy also never says when exactly this curse will take place. I haven’t seen either of these things done before and certainly never together.

Because of these events, Sonora spends a good deal of the story afraid of sleep and dreading the day when the curse comes. I’ve never seen that before and it was a really heavy subject handled very well. It really got me thinking about what it must be like to know something is going to happen yet being powerless to change it.

And while I’m not sure if the author was going for this or not (it’s quite possible I just read into it way too much) the story does seem to deal with the idea of what happens when we force our kids to be the way we want them to be. At Sonora’s birth she’s gifted with a loving heart. She then spends several different points in the book wondering if she loves someone because she loves them or because she’s forced too.

And beyond that, the gifts she was given often make her unlikeable- her being so much smarter than everyone else is more a curse than a blessing. So too it is with Prince Melvin XX. He’s so many things- brave, traditional, tall, honest, and strong, to name a few- and because of these things people find him hard to spend time with. These gifts often make them more awkward than anything and don’t enhance their place in society but rather make them fit into it even less.

Again, I’m not sure that’s what the author was going for and she was quite possibly just poking fun at a traditional fairy tale trope. But it made me think a lot and I enjoy it when books make me think so I wanted to include it.

There are also some very cute characters in this story. Elbert the shepherd and his family are such a fun addition to the story and Prince Christopher is the sweetest character (as we fangirls say- he is a cinnamon roll, too pure for this world).

What I Didn’t Like:

I'm going to try and keep this short and concise because I don’t want to keep anyone from reading this book. It really was a cute story, I just had issues with it. Mostly because there were a lot of places that were just plain illogical. I think the author was just trying to be humorous but it fell flat for me because of the jokes she was making.

Sonora is ten times as smart as everyone else and we’re told that even as a baby she thinks and acts as much like an adult as she’s able too- as she’s still a baby she still has to crawl and the like, but she can think and converse on a very mature level. She’s so smart that even as a kid, she never acts like a kid. She finds no use for toys and can’t play games with the other kids because she always finds problems with them. This bothered me because even highly intelligent children still act like children sometimes. Kids are still kids and they still have things that make them kids. But not so with Sonora!

But then, Sonora also spends a whole lot of time reading and studying and then sharing this knowledge with the world. And one of the things she likes to do is tell people what the purpose of things are. Except the purpose of things are more childish than factual.

For instance, she says that the purpose of winter is to produce ice so that people can eat flavored ice in the summer. Except that isn’t the purpose of winter, as someone who reads every book she can get her hands on would know. And it’s not like she can’t get her hands on a lot of books because she’s a princess who lives in a castle with the very well-stocked library.

Basically I just struggled with the inconstancy of whether or not Sonora was capable of acting childish. I felt like it kept me from really knowing her and that made me feel disconnected from her. A book can be really hard to read when you feel disconnected from the main character.

As I said, I’m sure it was just the author trying to keep the same light-hearted, comical tone of the other books, but in this story it fell short for me.

Overview:

Overall, this wasn’t a bad book; not my favorite but I’m also pleased to have reread it again. It’s an interesting take on Sleeping Beauty and one that certainly has a lot of merit. And as with the others, it’s a fun, light-hearted story that could easily be read aloud even to a younger audience.

Looking forward to reading the other books in the series.

I’ll be back Monday with some musings on my own writing and I hope to see you then. Until the next time we meet don’t forget to live happily ever after <3

~Jennifer Sauer, the Ivory Palace Princess

P.S. Let’s Chat! What are some of your favorite Sleeping Beauty retellings? What’s something you’d like to see happen in a Sleeping Beauty retelling someday?