Get Your Hands off My Kid

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What starts off as a promising beginning, with a few twists, to a new retelling of “La Belle, au Bois, Dormant” comes to an abrupt and screeching halt. The author builds the tension, tightening the screws as the readers are immersed in a celebration of a newborn babe. This babe has been born after much fretting, longing and praying. But there is trouble brewing, slowly but surely building in the background until it looms up unexpectedly over the innocent infant. The king is less than faithful, the new stepmother is unconventionally fierce in protection of her stepchild and Carabosse, the fairy who was denied an invitation to give her blessing, is a stately, regal figure grieving the loss of a beloved sister.

Even though we know what’s coming, it’s a thrilling beginning to the story. Then we are thrust into the decidedly mundane world of one Filomena Jefferson-Cho. Odd name aside, Filomena grouches how nothing ever happens to her in spite of her helicopter parents’s constant worries that she’ll be abducted by fairies or some such disaster. Filomena is firmly grounded in the 21st-century modern world and has no truck with her parents’s worry.

Filomena is lonely and it shows. But her quotidian problems aren’t much compared to whatever was going to happen to the infant Princess Eliana. For this reader, being rudely snatched away from the tense baptism scene and brought to see Filomena itching to buy the latest book about a magical kingdom is a real comedown and left me more than a little grouchy. Bring me back to Carabosse! I want to learn about her blessing. Is it what I know from the ancient story or something completely different?

Perhaps this bait-and-switch tactic will appeal to another reader. But right now I’m as disappointed as Filomena about not getting the next installment of her favorite book.