Fairy Tale Book Review: Sleeping Cinderella & Other Princess Mix-ups
Sleeping Cinderella and Other Princess Mix-ups by Stephanie Clarkson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a cute book — I liked the illustrations and the way it played with the tropes of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Snow White’s fairy tales, imagining what might happen if they could inhabit one another’s stories. And it was nice to see how this experiment reverberated back into their “regular lives” as they negotiated to get better deals for themselves. Especially gratifying was Snow White’s insistence that the dwarfs pitch in to help her clean. FINALLY.
The rhymes felt a little forced at times, and even though it’s a children’s book, I was annoyed that it glossed over the roadblocks that kept some of these princesses where they were in the first place — if Rapunzel could leave and return to her tower as easily as she does in this book, she would have no story at all!
My favorite page is the one where we see what Cinderella decides to do with her life, though:
“Cinderella went off to college instead, met a regular guy–less well-off but well-read.”
The best kind!