Customer Reviews

Never After

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Never After is a fairy tale within a fairy tale...several times over. If you are looking for passion, high drama, intrigue, or mystery...find another book. But, if you are a fairy tale lover with a funny bone, you've found what you're looking for.

I was afraid that I would not like this book at first, but as soon as I met the main heroine, Vevila, I was hooked...

The story starts out with a prince, who can only marry someone of equal or higher rank, on the hunt for a princess. He unfortunately lives during a time of severe princess shortages. He reads about a princess, cursed into eternal sleep, and goes on a quest to rescue her with his kiss. But even the best scribes can blow it, as the prince finds out. It's not a princess, but three identical princes who need a royal to awaken them with a kiss. But there is a lovely maiden asleep in their castle, so our prince, Athelstan, asks his cousin, Vevila, to break the curse for him. Since this will take her away from all her suitors, handsome yet boring certainly included, Vevila agrees. But the princes are guarded by their fairy godmother, and she will allow no one to kiss them until they have undergone a princess test...or two. So Vevila is locked up with a pile of straw and ordered to spin it into gold...and that's only the beginning.

Includes spoofs of The Frog Prince, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, and lots more. It was hilarious...especially the fairy godmother who happens to resemble a wicked witch and is slightly, well, nuts really. Try this book! It's great.

A Twelve-year-old reading fanatic

I thought this story was really good, but I thought Prince Alth(how do you spell it?) really dropped the whole story down a notch on the enternainment level. I was reading the other reviews, and I think that "something" that it's missing is the climax, it's good and all, but there is no part where they're rushing against time, they simply talk and do amusing things and then suddenly the curse is broken and we're to the conclusion. Another thing that I found dissapionting Vevila's ending, she just agrees (if you've read it you'll know what to)too easily at the end. The "Library's Review" (one of the reviews, I'm not sure if that's the correct one)said that the wizards don't do anything, and I disagree they let you know what's going on, because the prince is far too stupid to know or bother to tell anyone, so All in all I'd recommend picking this book up at the library to read once, but not to buy.

This a short book, but if you are a fan of fairy tale retellings with a little romance and humor, you should like this one.

A rather dim-witted but nice prince finds an enchanted vine-covered castle full of sleeping people including a very beautiful woman that he falls for. In this castle, though, it is a prince that needs kissed and awakened before this beauty and the rest of the castle can be roused. Against her will, he recruits his smart, tomboyish cousin, Vevila, (whom he finds trying to run away from her suitors) to help him wake the prince with her kiss. From that point, much of the story focusses on the strong-willed Princess Vevila and the Princess Tests she is put through by the prince's "protectress", a fairy godmother with a few psychiatric problems. A mysterious swamp dweller, a cute, nameless, short man, an imposter perfect princess, a wicked stepmother desperate to find princes for her daughters, and a trio of pompous, greedy wizards round out the cast.

There is a lot of story packed into this small package! There are shades of Sleeping Beauty, the Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin, The Princess and the Pea, Cinderella and more, all with a bit of humor and a twist. And they all lived happily ever after...

There's something so appealing about a fractured fairy tale, and this book fractures several, with hilarious results. Is the tale of Sleeping Beauty really about a princess, or was there a mistake in the transcription of "3 princes"? What really happened to the princess who supposedly felt a pea through a tower of mattresses and blankets? Here is a Cinderella, a Rumpelstiltskin, a Frog Prince, that you never imagined.
Some of the characters are, admittedly, a little flat. The wizards, while amusing, are never really revealed, nor is Prince Althelstan. The real draw is the tough, adventurous, independent-minded sort-of princess Vevila and her not-entirely-functional relationship with Rumpelstiltskin, who, for some reason, is determined to prove she's a real princess. The plot twists and turns and, at times, comes dangerously close to not making any sense. That, however, is part of the joy of a fractured fairy tale, and doesn't hurt the book one bit.
It's not a deep or challenging book, but it *is* funny, charming, and clever. A great diversion for a lazy afternoon, one you'll probably want to read again.

I happened upon this book by accident and picked it up as a gift for my wife. As it happened, I ended up reading it first.

'Never After' is an unusual fairy tale, seemingly set in another world where tiny kingdoms, and their resulting princes, abound. Due to a most unusual curse - or not, depending on who you ask - there have been very few princesses born in the last generation, so bound to marry a royal princess, prince Athelard goes in search of one reputed to lie asleep in an enchanted palace.

Then he discovers that it's not really a sleeping princess, but a prince. Three of them. And he needs a princess to kiss them to wake them up.

Things get very strange from there.

The characters in the story can't seem to make up their mind who they are - characters from real fairy tales (Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella both make appearances) or modern men and women from sitcoms (the completely unaware prince, the feminist tomboy princess). The result is meant as a humorous take on Grimm's tales but winds up being merely indecisive instead.

Writing humor is always hit-or-miss at best, and gets worse when one tries to make genre humor. 'Never After', unfortunately, is a miss - albeit one in good company. It had a few genuinely funny moments, but mostly it was just a moderately interesting tale, not a book destined to remain in my personal collection for very long.

This was one of the funniest books I've read in some time. Take Sleeping Beauty, the Princess and the Pea, Cinderella, and Rumplestilskin, add one take-no-prisoners princess, and you've got a great read. Not quite the British humor you'd see in Terry Pratchett, but great fun throughout. If you're looking for bodice-ripping romance, look elsewhere. If you want a thouroughly enjoyable, solid, humorous spin on fairy tales, try this book.

I very nearly didn't read this book. Six months ago I opened it up, read the first page, decided it was duller than dishwater and put it back on the shelf. But recently I decided to give it a second go (I had a lot of time on my hands) and I'm so glad that I did. By twenty pages in it had gotten much better. I know they say don't judge a book by its cover, but in this case, don't judge it by its first few pages, either. If its author is reading this review, my advice to her is basic but essential: you must grab the reader's attention right from page one, or you could lose them. Sadly, page one in this book is mostly just dry descriptions of a forest et al. It didn't grab my attention at all. And these lengthy descriptions weren't poignant or even essential to the story. (A mere sentence of description outlining the essential facts would have been better.) I struggled to try to remember all the small details, thinking that they might be essential to the plot. They weren't. They were just filler. Unfortunately, there were many descriptions like this throughout the book that really should have been left out or shortened. Seriously, we don't need to know the contents of every room of the castle or to have every leaf on every vine in the garden described to us! These things are irrelevant, and actually get in the way of the plot, slowing it down.

However, in spite of that, this was a suprisingly decent book. It had many interesting twists and turns in its storyline, and even though it borrowed a number of plot points from numerous classic fairytales, it often did so in an unpredictable and original manner. The author obviously did a LOT of work thinking out her storyline and it shows. There's enough plot twists in this for ten storylines, and they're all good ones.

I must say, though, that my main reason for enjoying this was the character of Vevila. She was such a rebel and an adventurer. I loved her! She was sassy, sarcastic, clever and resourceful. Best of all, though, she wasn't afraid to be rude to people who irked her, and to speak her mind--and haven't we all wanted to do that from time to time, when idiots annoy us! She met her match in Rumpelstiltskin, though, whose character was thoroughly charming. They were my favourites in the book. I also liked the wizard Rueberry, although I think less emphasis should have been put on his compulsive overeating. I mean, I got it, he was fat 'cause he ate a lot, but did we constantly have to hear every detail of everything he ate? It wasn't funny. It was just repetitive.

I really liked the ending of this book. It was a fairytale ending, sure, with the obligatory 'happily ever after', but the fun lay in finding out just what it was that made the ending 'happy' for each of these people. It made me think of the lyrics of a Rolling Stones song, the one that goes, 'you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, then you might find, you get what you need'. I hope I've quoted those lyrics exactly right, but even if I haven't, you get the general idea. I especially liked Prince Althelston's happy ending. He'd foolishly fallen in love with a romantic ideal, a fantasy that was something quite different from reality, and he was about to get a lesson in reality, a lesson he well deserved. He had fled the frying pan only to marry the fire. It was delicious irony. Read it, and you'll know what I mean.

I also liked when the wizard Mazigian was cursed only to be able to speak in quotes from Shakespeare. That truly would be a curse! Ugh!

This book was written in an unusual style, and not one I would have chosen myself. Nonetheless, I still think it worked pretty well. Most shockingly, though, it broke the mould by not having a single chapter in it! Rather, it was written in segments. Like the storyline, I found that very fresh, original and appealing.

I thought this book was well worth the effort I took in reading it. It's not the best book I've read this year, but it has definitely made my top twenty. It's witty, intelligent, and its characters are very well-rounded and three dimensional, with distinctive personalities. If you read between the lines, you'll understand their motivations. Even the wicked 'witch' is really just an overprotective, well-meaning but sadly delusional fairy godmother who is merely trying to protect her beloved godchild, the prince, from a world she perceives to be too cruel and wicked for one such as he. (And to the Amazon reviewer who said they were disappointed that the witch did not get punished for her wrongdoings, think this through: what could be a worse punishment than to find that the one you love the most, the one you've built your world around, does not love you, but actually fears and despises you!? I think she was definitely punished!) I would readily recommend this book to others, although I think it might be unsuitable for the much younger teens, not because of any adult themes, but simply because it is written in an advanced, mature, adult style, with lots of big words. Clever, highly literate kids will like it though.

This was an entertaining tale set in a slightly subversive fairytale world.

The witch (fairy godmother?) is affectionately portrayed, more so than the slightly colourless "prince charming" and all the major players make an appearance, in one guise or another (Rumplestiltskin, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, the Frog Prince/King, and so on and so forth). . . Vevila (- specifically named to include -evil- ?) is the only "real" princess and she is as unorthodox as possible, so much so that the King has specifically created laws that his son is unable to marry Vevila, which is what gives the prince the impetus to pursue his adventure.

Characters like the magicians add humor, although it occasionally seems to digress too much and leave some characters hanging, they do have their own charm.

I found Rueberry a particularly likeable individual, with his penchant for remembering meals and extra wheels of cheese.

The punning involved with a certain wizard cursed to find a Shakespearian quote for every occasion is amusing, and as the quotes are frequently obscure trying to place them can be entertaining.

Certain characters could have been explored in more depth although then the book could loose it's frivolous feel, which mayn't have been a bad thing.

In the end I was expecting Ureceacea(sp? how does one pronounce that!) to be revealed as more than the sum of her parts, but nothing happens which is a bit of a let down.

I realised I was expecting some sort of "Howls Moving Castle; Sophie" type transformation, but the author does not go so far.

I would rate it 3 stars, and would read other books by this author.

Would like to see further adventures of the subsidiary characters (although all the characters seem to be subsidiary characters with no clearly defined lead, but hopping from one set to another).

Still, it was enjoyable, just not riveting - example, I was willing to put it down half way and go to sleep at a reasonable hour, rather than staying up until every last page was turned.

Kotori

However, there were many problems with this book. There was absolutly no character development. I felt the characters were flat and the reader never understood WHY the characters were doing the things that they did. The entire book read like a storyboard outline or a skeletal framework that was never fleshed out into the full potential that it could have been. The anti-climactic ending. The entire book could have been related in one or two chapters as a flashback to the real story; the ending was just beginning the real story of saving a kingdom that could have been filled with adventure... sadly we are given... they go to "save the kingdom and they all lived happily ever after." I was highly disappointed that I spent the money on it.

I love "Fractured Fairytales" so "Never After" was a must-read for me.

When Prince Athelstan goes questing for the perfect bride, he discovers that behind the circle of thorns enshrouding the castle legend said held Sleeping Beauty, there were only sleeping princes. He returns with his cousin, Vevila, who is equally tired of courtship and is going out to seek adventure.

There's a whole cast of odd characters to boot and a lot of genuinely good laughs. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Lickiss' work.