Dazzled by Books

"Princess of Thorns" by Stacey Jay was a fun book to read. Princess Aurora or "Ror" spends most of the book disguised as a boy. Ror wants to raise an army to save her brother from their evil ogre step-grandmother. In this fairy tale, Ror is the daughter of Sleeping Beauty. In this version fo the story Sleeping Beauty didn't have her happily ever after. Ror ended up being cursed and gifted with fairy magic.

"Princess of Thorns" is not your typical retelling. This retelling seems to have a few different fairy tales all rolled into one. There are references to Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, The Swan Princess, and Sleeping Beauty. I have to admit it was little different knowing that Sleeping Beauty and her daughter shared the same name. It made understanding the story a little confusing at times. It seems like the fairy gifts that she was blessed with in this story is different from the original Sleeping Beauty tale. The original tale the gifts seemed to benefit Aurora, but in this version of the story, the gifts seem to take an ugly turn. Instead of people just loving Aurora or "Ror" they seem to become her servants, which is not Ror's intention.

I really enjoyed the friendship between Ror and Niklaas. Niklaas thought Ror was her brother the entire time, so he truly didn't  that Ror was the princess that he is wanting to marry. Ror has no intention to marry Niklaas at all. I was very interested to find out if Niklaas would end up finding out that Ror is not who he thought "he/she" was. I really wanted to know what Niklaas reaction and thoughts would be once he learned the truth.

"Princess of Thorns" is a pretty enjoyable read but I would have to say that it isn't as good as I expected it to be. There was a ton of dialogue. Way too much in my opinion. I really didn't like that a lot of the traditional Sleeping Beauty story was used for this retelling but it wasn't about Sleeping Beauty at all, so in some ways that made the story very hard to read and follow. I don't feel like the world was developed very well. With the book being mostly dialogue, I don't feel like that let a lot of room for world building.