a book I love: Dealing with Dragons
I started reading this last night and finished it while I was at work. (Don't give me any grief; I work the Circulation counter at my library every day, and I sit and wait for people to need help. I'm allowed to read.)
My friend P.C. mentioned this when I was looking for books for the 2015 reading challenge. She simply mentioned the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, and I put the first book on my to-read list, but if you've been to my Goodreads page, you may have noticed that my to-read list there is 641 books long. (And that's just the books I've heard of while I had access to a computer or paper and pen!) So the series got lost in the shuffle until someone mentioned it recently, and I requested the first book from the local public library.
(I've read Patricia C. Wrede before; I found her Snow White and Rose Red when I was in junior high, and I absolutely loved it. I still read it about once every two years.)
Back to Dealing with Dragons: man. I said this at Goodreads, and I'll say it here: where was this book when I was eight or nine?! I would have loved it. As it is, I'm reading it for the first time at the age of forty-four, so better late than never. (It wasn't published until I was sixteen.) I was always more enamored of the princesses who kicked butt, like Wonder Woman and Princess Leia, rather than the Disney princesses I grew up watching, so Princess Cimorene is my kind of princess.
Cimorene is the seventh daughter in her family, and she wants more than to sit and embroider and wait for her parents to arrange a match for her. On the sly, she learns fencing, cooking, languages, and magic. When she gets taken to a neighboring kingdom for her marriage to take place, she is given advice on how to run away after grumbling that she'd rather be eaten by a dragon than marry the vapid prince her parents have chosen. Where does she end up? In a cave with five dragons. Cimorene finds a place with one of these dragons, Kazul, becoming the dragon's princess. She is content there, though she has to shoo away annoying knights and princes who get sent to rescue her ... she doesn't want to be rescued!
Any more than that, and I'll be spoiling you. The target audience of this is readers aged ten and up, or maybe a precocious eight year old. If I had a kid to whom I liked to read, I would love to spend a few weeks reading this to him/her/them. As it's just middle-aged me, yeah, it isn't the most complex plot or characters ever, but the story is charming and sweet. I liked both Kazul and Cimorene a lot. I have requested the remaining three books from the public library, and I have anxiously checked the library's website twice today to see if I might get them before the weekend.
My friend P.C. mentioned this when I was looking for books for the 2015 reading challenge. She simply mentioned the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, and I put the first book on my to-read list, but if you've been to my Goodreads page, you may have noticed that my to-read list there is 641 books long. (And that's just the books I've heard of while I had access to a computer or paper and pen!) So the series got lost in the shuffle until someone mentioned it recently, and I requested the first book from the local public library.
(I've read Patricia C. Wrede before; I found her Snow White and Rose Red when I was in junior high, and I absolutely loved it. I still read it about once every two years.)
Back to Dealing with Dragons: man. I said this at Goodreads, and I'll say it here: where was this book when I was eight or nine?! I would have loved it. As it is, I'm reading it for the first time at the age of forty-four, so better late than never. (It wasn't published until I was sixteen.) I was always more enamored of the princesses who kicked butt, like Wonder Woman and Princess Leia, rather than the Disney princesses I grew up watching, so Princess Cimorene is my kind of princess.
Cimorene is the seventh daughter in her family, and she wants more than to sit and embroider and wait for her parents to arrange a match for her. On the sly, she learns fencing, cooking, languages, and magic. When she gets taken to a neighboring kingdom for her marriage to take place, she is given advice on how to run away after grumbling that she'd rather be eaten by a dragon than marry the vapid prince her parents have chosen. Where does she end up? In a cave with five dragons. Cimorene finds a place with one of these dragons, Kazul, becoming the dragon's princess. She is content there, though she has to shoo away annoying knights and princes who get sent to rescue her ... she doesn't want to be rescued!
Any more than that, and I'll be spoiling you. The target audience of this is readers aged ten and up, or maybe a precocious eight year old. If I had a kid to whom I liked to read, I would love to spend a few weeks reading this to him/her/them. As it's just middle-aged me, yeah, it isn't the most complex plot or characters ever, but the story is charming and sweet. I liked both Kazul and Cimorene a lot. I have requested the remaining three books from the public library, and I have anxiously checked the library's website twice today to see if I might get them before the weekend.
Comments
Post a Comment