Customer Reviews

Princess Ben

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've read, loved, studied, and taught fairy tales all my life. Every three years I co-teach a graduate school fairy tale course and, since 1990, I've been doing a Cinderella unit with my fourth graders. So I'm always interested in new versions of these old tales as well as original ones. At the same time, because many of these come up short for me, I am a wary reader of them, especially those featuring feisty oppositional heroines who are too often pallid cousins of Gail Carson Levine's Ella and Patricia Wrede's Cimorene. So I was both curious and dubious as I started reading Catherine Murdock's Princess Ben. And here I am, after finishing it last night, having enjoyed it sufficiently to want to write about it at length.

So getting to the book itself, what was it that I liked so much? First of all, I was captivated immediately by the mannered writing style and voice. Murdock has really pulled off that old-fashioned first-person epistolary style and voice; it is very nicely done indeed. At first I was very conscious of this as I read (in a good way -- I was simply enjoying her sentences and vocabulary) , but once I got into the plot I stopped paying attention; I'm guessing she sustained it all the way through. For the last few years I've been listening to a lot of Dickens, Collins, and now Eliot so I'm very conscious of this old-fashioned style and it grates on me when writers try it unsuccessfully. So bravo to Murdock for pulling it off.

The characters are all very complex -- no one is totally bad or totally good; a very nice way of deepening and complicating the usual good/bad cast of characters in traditional fairy tales. I began thinking they would be stock versions or variations or opposites of the traditional types and enjoyed the way every single one of them turned out to be more nuanced than I originally thought they were. My main quibble would be with Ben's parents. They are left as single-dimensional ghosts of her memory and perhaps that is as it should be, given her circumstances, but I did feel that I wanted to know more about them, especially her mother. For a while I did wonder about Ben's gluttony, thinking Murdock was going for a large-princesses-are-lovable-too. But she went a different and original direction that I found worthwhile (and I'm not usual one for psychological meanings, but this was interesting enough for me to feel okay with it).

The plot is captivating, engaging, and kept me reading and guessing. If I were on an award committee this year I would want to consider harder the climax of the story and whether it is a bit out-of-nowhere. (Won't say more for fear of spoilage.) But since I'm not, I'll just leave it as is. It worked just fine for me.

So, all in all, a very elegantly written and satisfying literary fairy tale.

Fans of Catherine Gilbert Murdock's previous books, Dairy Queen and its sequel, The Off Season , will be surprised and excited to discover that PRINCESS BEN is a tale in a completely different vein, yet equally enjoyable. This fantasy novel with fairy tale leanings is told by Princess Benevolence, who finds herself forced into becoming a "proper" princess after years of escaping the Queen's notice when the King is killed and his brother -- her father -- disappears.

At first Ben wants nothing more than to thwart Queen Sophia's every attempt to turn her into a lady, with the right manners and figure. She stumbles through dance classes, sneaks extra food whenever she can, and avoids all thought of her new position as heir to the throne. Locked during the night in a tower room, she finds a much more interesting way of passing the time when a secret passage leads her to a room of sorcery. Soon Ben is spending all her time learning spells, and half-sleeping through her days of lessons.

Ben's newfound contentment is disrupted when the threat of war looms. Thrown out into the world by the magical forces she still cannot completely control, she learns that there is some use for the skills the Queen tried to teach her after all. It will take all of her courage and determination to survive this challenge and become a true ruler.

Ben is a spirited narrator, and readers will love every minute they spend with her, from her somewhat spoiled beginnings to her later maturity. The story has enough twists to keep readers on their toes, and nothing and no one is quite what they first seem. The romance feels a little rushed, but it isn't the focus of the novel. This is really a story about a girl growing up and coming into her own in a strange and difficult world, and it will touch readers of all ages and situations.

Reviewed by: Lynn Crow

At first I was a little worried Princess Ben might turn out to be just another feisty princess story. All the ingredients are there: unconventional princess, arrogant prince, mean queen, locked tower, fire-breathing dragon, girl-disguised-in-boy's-clothing, magical prophecies - you know the drill. Fortunately this story kept me on my toes. Catherine Gilbert Murdock manages to take all the familiar fairy tale elements and turn them on their head.

Oh, and the voice! Ben has sardonically appealing wit, done in a style that sounds like it was written with a quill pen on parchment. She even sent me to the dictionary a time or two.

Finally, might I just add for the record that I LOVE it when an author does something completely different than what she's done before, and does it well?

In the author's attempt at eloquence, she uses such unnecessary flowery words, which painted no pictures or brought to mind no feelings. It was simply wordy for the sake of wordiness, and felt like the author had turned to her thesaurus at every sentence to see what extravagant turn of phrase she could create next.
Because it is a coming of age tale, at the beginning the main character is not likable in the least. But by the end, she is not lovable, either.
With a constant focus on food and her large weight, she suddenly has the realization that she's been eating for comfort, and not for sustenance. She instantly changes her ways, and food isn't mentioned again. Ridiculous. Eating disorders are never so easily conquered, and are perhaps too complicated a subject to be dissected in a book so short.
The love story element was under-developed, and I felt that I cared little for either Ben or her Prince.
The cute things I did appreciate, though, were the references made to fairy tales. The girl trades some "magic beans" for a cow, loses her shoe after a ball (by throwing it angrily at the prince), is stuck in a tall tower, and is laid under a spell to sleep.
If the author had used fewer words trying to sound intelligent, and more words fleshing out her characters, I might have loved this book. As it was, I didn't hate it. But I barely liked it.

Rated G. No parental guidance necessary for this one.

If you've enjoyed books by Gail Carson Levine (e.g. "Ella Enchanted", "Fairest"), Shannon Hale's "The Goose Girl" and its sequels, and Mercedes Lackey's 500 Kingdoms series, you'll be glad to add this to your collection. I'm looking forward to reading more from Catherine Murdock.

Princess Ben is human -- meaning she makes mistakes, she isn't always very nice (though never cruel), she has vices and she isn't a perfect little adult age 15. Such a relief! I'm a "grown-up" (supposedly) graduate student, and I'm not (usually) embarrassed to admit my lesiure reading isn't exactly scholarly. Many similar stories make me sad that if I'm not already perfect, I must really be the evil step-sister instead.

On their annual visit to her grandfather's tomb, Benevolence's mother and uncle are brutally murdered and her father goes missing. Compounding her personal tragedy is the fact that Ben's uncle was the king--and his lack of children means that Ben is the sole heir to the kingdom. Still reeling from the sudden death of her beloved mother and clinging to the thin shred of hope that her father will return home, Ben is placed under the care and supervision of her aunt, Queen Sophia, now serving as the queen regent. Ben is absolutely miserable in her forced princess lessons: she hates her boring and stuffy tutor, her clammy-handed dance instructor, the pointless small talk over dinner and, most of all, the sudden reduction in her food portions. A spot of hope arrives in the form of a hidden passage that leads to a room full of magic. Suddenly, Ben has something she really wants to do and stays up late practicing magic and then sleeps her way through her daily lessons. She also finds freedom in the numerous secret passages she discovers, giving her access to the entire castle. But then a ball is held to introduce her to potential suitors and Ben decides to use her magic to flee the castle and lead a life of her own choosing. She conjures a Doppelschlaferin--a sleeping double of herself--to take her place, because her aunt doesn't seem to require a talking, thinking princess. But then Ben's plans go awry and she finds herself in the neighboring country--the same one she suspects sent the assassins which attacked her parents. When she discovers that the enemy country has found a back route for attacking her kingdom, and that that country's crown prince has been summoned to kiss the sleeping princess--really Ben's Doppelschlaferin--to wake her up and possibly win the kingdom that way--Ben has no choice but to do everything she can to get back to her castle, save her kingdom, and keep from being married to a prince she despises.

PRINCESS BEN is, to put it simply, a really, really good book. It starts with the fact that Ben is such a fun narrator. She has a wry sense of humor and its fun watching her try to master magic--which she only sometimes gets right. What's also so refreshing is that while Ben is a bit of a self-centered and selfish character at the beginning--the sole heir to a kingdom running away when the country is at the brink of war isn't the best plan--she really grows and matures as the book progresses. I've just finished another YA book featuring a princess where she fails to grow up and take responsibility up to the very end and it was very frustrating. And Ben does not get boring as she matures. Far from it. She is still as spirited as ever, especially when she is trying to protect her kingdom or verbally sparring with the enemy kingdom's crown prince, Prince Florian.

Another great aspect of PRINCESS BEN is the supporting characters. In the beginning, Ben sees everything in black and white: her aunt is cruel and demanding, the enemy country's king and crown prince are bad and her tutor is useless. And in a lesser book, this would remain true. But in PRINCESS BEN, Ben sees that these shallow impressions don't always show the whole picture. The only complaint I'd have is that I loved when Prince Florian and Ben interacted and I was disappointed that they weren't together more. This book is really about Ben and her coming of age story, but I still would have liked a little more Florian, just because they played off each other so well.

I'd highly recommend this book for YA fans. Murdock has turned what could have been a typical princess story into something far more interesting through her sharp and clever writing. Furthermore, I found it amusing that Murdock plays with the idea of fairy tales--of which this story is one, with a very active heroine--by sprinkling in allusions to classic fairy tales throughout the novel (one of Ben's suitor's complains of a pea under his mattress keeping him up all night; everyone thinks that Ben's sleeping Doppelschlaferin must be awoken with a prince's kiss, etc.).

Princess Benevolence is just the kind of book you and your daughters should be reading. As a 23 year old bookseller and avid lover of fantasy and young adult/ intermediate literature, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Not only is Ben not the typical willowy "naturally thin" princess encountered in most books, she unselfconciously describes herself as plump. The story delves into many aspects of a young girls psychology, from making judgements too quickly, growing up, taking responsibility, and approches with great honesty and wisdom, emotional eating. We see Ben change from a spoiled and sheltered girl to one interested not only in her country but also uncommonly kind and seeking to help others. Magic is never used to much effect other than learning life truths, like how sometimes one needs sleep before working too hard, that diligence pays off, and that sometimes one has to clean before having fun. Far from being preachy, it brings across these lessons with a deft hand while maintaining a devastating wit and fast paced plot that keeps you reading through the night. Spiced with allusions to various fairy tales, this is a masterwork of prose and imagination.

Move over, Gail Carson Levine! For all of you who loved, obsessed, or even just liked Ella Enchanted, Princess Ben is for you. Ben (short for Benevolence) is in quite a predicament. Her parents and the king killed by assassins from a neighboring country, she finds herself heir apparent, and under the tutelage of her aunt, Queen Sophia, whose harsh ways quickly ensure that this princess would rather be the lowliest scullery maid than learn to be queen. But when she finds herself locked in the highest tower of the castle in true fairy tale fashion, she is amazed by the discovery a hidden magical room. There she learns spells from a mysterious spellbook while the castle sleeps. But Ben will have to learn more than magic if she's to ever escape from aunt's clutches and keep her country from being overrun by the very people that conspired in her parents' murders.

This was such a fun read. Ben's dilemmas, while set in rather mystical settings, are such that you can relate to. Never dull, she is an engaging narrator who weaves a subtle enchantment on the reader. Princess Ben is adventurous, romantic, entertaining, and most of all, a humorous story about growing up that anyone of any age will not help but love.

[...]

In Australia, this book is listed as being for 'primary school' age children. In America, it's slightly more realistically aimed at the 'young adult' market. But even that might be stretching it a bit, because the way this book is worded, it's going to be WAY too high-brow and complicated a read for the average kid. Problem is, the author seems to have used the 'thesaurus' feature of her PC far too often when she was writing this, assumedly in an attempt to make her character sound more posh. (In fact, it reminded me of that episode of 'Friends' where Joey tried to sound cleverer than he really was, and swapped almost every word in his letter to the adoption agency for a much longer, more complicated alternative from a thesaurus, resulting in a document that was painfully hard to read or fully comprehend.) And so, this book has a vocabulary so complicated that you usually wouldn't even see such words in adult fiction, words like these: obfuscated, pince-nez, chrysalis, trebuchet, sagacity, monotonously, obstreporous, pilasters, providentially, superficiality, omniscience, ribaldries, revetments, debauchery, salacious, vernal, fewmets, ebullient...to name but a few. And it's not just the occasional long word that the author slots in, it's entire statements or sentences in every paragraph like, for instance, these: Apparently her headache, or what we may euphemistically term headache, continued to plague her, OR, Well might one wonder at my myopia, OR, As I peered about the roomlet's gloaming, I espied an ascending flight of steps, OR, I touched rough-hewn masonry, and crudely applied mortar, OR, If earlier I only suspected a mysterious propitious force aiding my training, I now knew it as incontrovertible fact, OR, Memorization I considered imperative, however, for the spell was initiated in the prone position, OR, as I magicked myself a miniature fumarole, OR, Diplomatic correspondence I never saw; its contents were certainly not discussed at dinner. Whether this stemmed from the queen's inherent reticence, OR, to manage my chronic exhaustion, I discovered a singularly brilliant tactic: abject passivity.

And so it goes on and on throughout the entire book, page after page. See what I mean now? It's written more like a dry legal document than a book for kids or young adults. Most adults will understand the book, though be annoyed that it isn't written in a more reader-friendly, less complicated and less Yoda-esque fashion. But kids will probably be left wondering what is going on at least part of the time, and quickly lose patience with it. I'm not saying we should dumb down kids books and leave out long words altogether. But we also don't want to alienate kids by giving them books they can't properly understand, since that will probably sour the reading experience for them, and might make them less likely to want to read other books.

But it's not just the long-winded wording that makes me think this book isn't age appropriate as a kids' book -- some of the concepts in the book are pretty adult as well. Like when Ben overhears the Prince saying, "onerous as the marriage bed would prove", clearly deriding the thought of bedding down with her and, well, doing you-know-what. This is said in the middle of a very adult conversation, involving drinking, the singing of bawdy songs about shepherd girls and mountain goats, and much talking about bedding wenches, including this double entendre-ridden statement: "I dream of Rosalind and her soft PILLOWS. She is a delectable lass and would give herself to you in a heartbeat. She asks after you every time we frolic together" and this as well: "Clearly he has not savoured the pleasures of his own shepherdess". Really, like I said, this is not a book for the young kids of primary school age! I want to make that clear to anyone who's thinking of buying this for a kid.

BE WARNED: MY REVIEW MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS...

Actually, the vocab/writing style is not the only reason I wouldn't purchase this. In my opinion, it's INCREDIBLY dull for most of its overlong duration, not to mention dark and dreary. And the character of Ben, who narrates this, is for the most part repellant. I thought I would sympathise with her...she's an awkward kid with emotional issues who faces some tough times. And she's plump, which I thought would be refreshing in a heroine. Wrong! Unfortunately, the book is narrated by Ben in such a cold, clinical way for the most part that it is hard to feel anything but detachment from her, especially as Ben is a total self-centred whinger throughout the first two thirds of the book...until she suddenly changes and becomes a goodie-goodie competent heroine of a girl, which happens so abruptly that the change is unbelieveable. And Princess Ben's weight is treated as a joke -- she's constantly splitting her dresses at the worst possible time, or accidentally smearing herself with the food that she incessantly eats. Towards the end of the book, she suddenly realises that her constant eating could endanger the whole country, as a binge-eating princess is for some reason considered unfit to rule, but rather than proving to the world that a fat girl can be competent, instead Ben accepts what her elders tell her, that she must eat like a sparrow and conform and look pretty for her suitors. In fact, the book actually reads like a big statement that says: FAT GIRLS ARE RIDICULOUS AND UNLOVEABLE, AND IF THEY WANT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND WIN THE HANDSOME PRINCE, THEY MUST SLIM DOWN. Maybe the writer didn't mean to say that so harshly, maybe she was just trying to write a cautionary tale to the kids of today about the risks of excessive weight gain, but that's the way it comes across, as if to say, you'll never be anyone who's worth anything unless you slim down and try to look and behave like everyone else. The writer doesn't go so far as to say that anorexia is good -- in the end, Ben is still a bit plump and curvy -- but nonetheless, the pro-starvation (Ben lost weight through starvation and hard toil as a P.O.W.) ethic is still there. The 'moral' of this story is more like a lecture than a real life lesson, and girls will learn nothing of genuine value from it about weight and self-esteem issues, least of all any way to genuinely resolve them, short of becoming a prisoner of war, which surely no one could recommend. This book is not quite the 'pro-feminist, girls are strong' kind of book I was led to believe it would be in the other reviews. Also of concern is the fact that the prince in the book is an arrogant twit. Worse, he is cruel -- he tries to invade Ben's country, he says some nasty things about Ben, and at one point, Princess Ben dares to tell him a few honest home truths about himself, at which time he orders her chained and thrown in a dungeon, to be put to death by hanging for her insubordination -- a sentence he never at any time rescinds or apologises for. If someone did those things to me, I would hold it against them, to say the least. Yet Ben doesn't. Soon after that, she starts describing the prince as noble, good, witty, clever and chivalrous, and says that she loves him with all her heart. Honestly, she reminded me of one of those sad, battered women you see on 'Springer' who keep going back to the abusive husband. Books like this seem to send the message that: 'hey girls, it doesn't matter if your man tries to kill you just for speaking back to him, so long as you love him you should still marry him, and things will turn out just great!' Sickening. Another thing the author did wrong was that she made it hard to work out how old the heroine was. At first, from the way Ben acted, throwing tantrums and wanting sweets, I assumed she was about six years old. But then the queen began planning to marry her off, and so I assumed Ben must be in her mid teens. The Ben says, "I am not a child," and someone replies "Of course you are not," which made me revise her age in my head again to somewhere in the late teens. Then Ben says, 'Surely the promise that marriage would relieve me of housework (a promise that every sane woman knows as falsehood) had appeal', which made her sound about thirty or forty and possibly a bitter divorcee. I was confused until I got to page 259, where I finally learned that she was fifteen, turning sixteen. Usually, if a writer is good, you can work out a character's approximate age without even having to be told. But this author threw me so many curve balls...it was annoying. As was most of the rest of the content of this book.

Actualy, I must confess, I didn't hate the last quarter of the book. Ben became a little more likeable, and the plot became more exciting. That's why I'm giving it 2 stars, not 1. But for the most part, I was bored and annoyed. This book contains all the usual fairy tale cliche elements, and openly plagiarises many other fairytales: Snow White, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, etc. -- but I've seen that done before, and I've seen it done much better. Perhaps it didn't help that the book I read before this one, 'Bella at Midnight', was much better -- this one suffered in the comparison, since the two are in some ways very similar. I'd recommend you read that book instead, and forget about this one. But still, that's just my humble opinion. Do what you will. Or to put it into Ben-type-speak, 'Use your wherewithall to extrapolate the multitudinous theoretical outcomes at your disposal'.

Princess Ben is absolutely wonderful! Exceptionally well written, with good character development, smart plot twists, and very engaging story line. Thoroughly enjoyed all the tie-ins to traditional fairy tale plot lines - very cleverly done!