Like Flinn's other young adult novel I read (Beastly) this is a fairy tale re-done and modernized. In this case its 'Sleeping Beauty' and I definitely feel less of a Disney vibe from this (for some reason Beastly put me in mind of the Disney Beauty and the Beast, not the fairy tale itself). I do admit however that Sleeping Beauty was never a popular fairy tale for me growing up--it didn't seem like the Princess did anything at all, but she got herself a Prince. It seemed terribly unfair to me.

The book itself is broken up into 3 Parts--Part 1: Talia (before the curse), Part 2: Jack (before he broke the curse) and then Part 3 Talia and Jack (after the curse is broken), with Part 1 and 2 being told in first person from Talia or Jack's POV and the third part alternating back and forth between them.

At first Talia annoyed me--she really did seem like the obnoxious brat her companion, Lady Brooke, accused her of being. For instance for her 16th birthday she wanted the PERFECT gown to celebrate so her father orders in 25 different dressmakers to create 20 different dresses all in her particular size. She is very rude to most of them out loud and even worse mentally. I was kind of happy when she got cut down to size by the witch Malvoila.

Then I met Jack and any annoyances I had towards Talia went out the window. Jack is every worse teenage stereotype all rolled up into one (for much of the book at least). He's in Europe, on a vacation across the continent and all he does is complain about how its not all topless beaches and sleazy euro-trash celebrities in cafes. He's visiting all sorts of museums and while he's sort of interested, he's too busy trying to get to the topless beaches to really care.

The two of them together is humorous--its kind of a test of wills to see who can outdo the other in sheer brattiness. Talia at least has a decent reason--she's a Princess after all and let's face it traditionally raised royal children in fairy tales are not sweet, generous and used to trials. Jack seems to mostly want to embrace his inner angst muffin status and be left alone to sulk about his misfortunes and ruined summer.

In the end I wasn't as interested in this book as I was in Beastly and its style (I really did like the chat room sessions for all of the unfortunate transformed kids), plus with both leads vying to annoy me the most I didn't want them together. The world would implode came to mind a few times. ( )

A beautiful retelling of Sleeping Beauty. After reading Beastly I became totally in love with Alex Flinn. This book was amazing and I loved it to the end! I did find it to be a little childish, but it was a good retelling of Sleeping Beauty. I also would have loved more action involved, but overall the book was great! Cute and great! ( )

I didn't fall in love with this one as much as I did with Beastly but I still really enjoyed it.

Well written and engaging. I especially liked how Talia was a very kind and sensible girl and how Jack grew and changed during the story. ( )

Couldn't stand it. Alex Flinn- your one chance has been lost. ( )

http://romancebookie.blogspot.com/2011/04/cheesy-modern-day-sleeping-beauty.html ( )