As Levine says, 'In Sleeping Beauty, the prince falls in love with the princess when he knows only three things about her: she's pretty, she's a princess, and she doesn't snore. That picture book turned into The Fairy's Mistake, and that's how the series got started.' Her six short stories reinvent traditional fairy tales, looking to fill gaps in logic. She liked one, which was then called Talk Is Cheap? But she thought it should be a short novel, rather than a picture book, and she asked me to do three more. According to Levine, 'After Ella Enchanted was published, I submitted some of my old, much rejected picture books to my editor. The road to happily-ever-after isn't easy when a baker's son and a princess fall in love in The Fairy's Return.Įlements of the classics are woven into these not-so-typical retellings of 'Toads and Diamonds,' 'The Princess and the Pea,' 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'The Princess on the Glass Hill,' 'Puddocky,' and 'The Golden Goose.' The fresh and funny twists on favorite fairy tales will win the hearts and capture the imaginations of young readers everywhere.Levine, following the success of her adaptation of the Cinderella story into Ella Enchanted, continued telling fairy tales with a twist in what would become her Princess Tales series. In For Biddle's Sake, Parsley tries to forget her beloved prince and get used to life as a Biddlebum Toad. Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep features a genius of a princess, a hundred years of snooze, two princes, and a flock of balding sheep! Cinderella is a boy in Cinderellis and the Glass Hill, and the glass slipper is a glass hill. In The Princess Test, the author spoofs the notion that a pea can prove a person's pedigree.

The high jinks begin in The Fairy's Mistake, which pokes fun at a meddlesome fairy whose plans for good go terribly awry. Now, for the first time, the six beloved Princess Tales are together in one magnificent volume: Ever since Newbery Honor author Gail Carson Levine introduced the magical village of Snettering-on-Snoakes in the faraway Kingdom of Biddle, young readers have been laughing their way through her hilarious retellings of famous and not-so-famous fairy tales.

The Princess Test by Gail Carson Levine