Princess of Thorns

by Stacey Jay

[cornerfolds]

In case you're new to the blog and don't know, I LOVE retellings! I haven't actually found one I completely hated because I feel like it's really hard to mess up a story that's already amazing. This take on Sleeping Beauty was one I was really excited to dive into. While Aurora was never my favorite princess, I was definitely excited to read this retelling! Unfortunately... it was weird.

First of all, this is not a Sleeping Beauty retelling. It's the story of Sleeping Beauty's daughter, who also happens to be named Aurora, for some reason. It seems like lazy planning to me, but whatever. In this story Aurora 1.0 was trapped by the evil queen (a troll here, instead of Maleficent) and forced to off herself in order to pass on her fairy magic to her daughter, Aurora 2.0, whose job it is to bring balance to the force (or something like that).

This.Book.Was.Weird. I wanted to love it so much! And I did love parts of it. Most notably, the romance between Aurora and Niklaas. I loved their relationship when he thought she was a boy and after! They were great! Unfortunately, all of the characters weren't great so that's really where the amazingness ends.

The evil Queen Ekeeta was ridiculous. Her sudden redemption was unbelievable and way too convenient and really took away all the greatness of her evil character. The book lost most of its credibility with that move. And that's not even the worst of it! Princess of Thorns makes the totally noble and amazing Prince Phillip out to be a completely disgusting pig. And I'm not okay with that.

The world building was okay, although I didn't feel like I got nearly enough fairytale elements for a fairytale retelling. The writing was good and tried really hard to be poetic, but that wasn't enough to save this really weird retelling that wasn't actually a retelling.

I feel like all this book did was recycle a character's name and use it to build a totally unrelated story, while calling it a retelling. Perhaps on its own this would be a good book, but trying to tie it into a preexisting story (and failing miserably) ruined it for me.

Actual Rating: 2.5 stars