Rating: WORTHY!
I've had mixed success with Sally Huss books. This is the fifth one of hers I've read, and now on balance she writes a worthy book, because I recommend this one. One Hundred Eggs for Henrietta, which I reviewed back in March 2015 was a good one, Who took my banana? from April 2015 not so good. Plain Jane reviewed in July 2015 was another winner, but What's Pete's Secret? from August 2015 was lacking verve, so batting .500 I went into another adventure and this brought-up the score to .600.
This one is obviously based on the Princess and the Pea, so I was curious to see what this author did with this venerable Hans Christian Anderson story. Written in poetry, the story begins with the prince demanding a sensitive princess. My problem with this was that there was no definition offered for children as to what sensitive means, and we jumped straight from that to the prince's lackey stacking-up mattresses without any discussion as to how they will discover if a princess is sensitive or not. We learn that the plan is to use a pea, but not how they arrived at this decision; there's also the not-so-subtle change in the definition of sensitive - from an implied mental state to a purely physical one. This is bait and switch! But it's the same as the original story (except that sensitivity isn't mentioned until afterwards in the original).
There is also no indication that the pea is a dried one in either story. I assume it was in the original - or at least a fresh one which is a lot sturdier than the peas most of the potential audience has likely encountered. My fear is that they will think the pea is just like the ones they eat off their plates - soft and squishy. There was a real potential for humor here, but we never saw it, which to me was a sad omission. Also, in this story the prince is the one obsessing on the princess's 'sensitivity' whereas in the original, it's the prince's mom. There's no word in either book on what the prince's dad - the king - was doing during all this time.
All of the princesses appear to be informed beforehand that their pea is there under the mattresses, which is also not in the original story. What's to stop them lying about what they feel when they're lying there - the mere fact of their royal birth? Plus the girls all fall in line with this prince's obsession. I felt that a dose of feminism would have been nice here, and I was pleased to see it pop up at the end in that the princess has a similar challenge for the prince. This elevated the story sufficiently for me to label this one a worthy read.
Kudos to the author for turning it around. I would have liked to have seen it turned around a lot more, but this will do as a start. I think it would be a fun thing to examine the original story (which I do on my website, if you're reading this elsewhere) and see what's wrong with it from a modern perspective. Meanwhile I recommend this book as an amusing take on the original.
Here is pretty much the original story (it's very short!):
There was a prince who wanted to marry a princess, but she would have to be a real princess. He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.
One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it. There was a princess standing at the gate, but good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. Water ran from her hair and clothes; it ran into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels, and yet she said that she was a real princess.
Well, we'll soon find that out! thought the old queen. She said nothing, but went into the bed-room and took all the bedding off the bed. She laid a pea on the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses. On this the princess had to lie all night; in the morning she was asked how she had slept.
"Oh, very badly!" said she. "I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It's horrible!"
Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds. No-one but a real princess could be as sensitive as that, so the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.
This princess seems to be of extraordinarily high-maintenance to me - she's black and blue after sleeping on forty layers of bedding and the only thing causing her discomfort was the pea? Of what value would the princess be if she was so delicate? The prince (or his mom in this case) seems to be conflating fragility with sensitivity, yet he's hypocritically completely insensitive to putting all of these princesses through this nightmarish and precarious night on forty layers of bedding.
Plus he's insensitive to the feelings and condition of all of his female subjects if he's so insistent that not a one of them is good enough for his hand in marriage. Only a princess will do? What a royal pain he is! What an aristocratic snob! They drag the princess in from the pouring rain, and not a word about drying her off or offering her a warm bath? And what kind of princess is she if she's standing out in the pouring rain knocking on the door? There was no royal carriage for her to ride in? There were no footmen or servants to knock on the door? No one to hold her umbrella? That hardly strikes me as a real princess! LOL! So no, the original story made no sense to begin with, so anything has to be an improvement, but I think Sally Huss gave it a fair shot.
