There are fewer mashed together fairy tales (though we do get quite a bit of “Jack and the Beanstalk”), with the focus much more on Jack, May and Philip, and some very hard choices they each have to make about if, and how, they’re going to take a stand against the Wicked Queen. The third book, Once Upon the End, brings the Wicked Queen back to the center of the story. However, each individual adventure is pretty cool, so as long as you roll with it a bit, it works!
The plot was entertaining, although at times I felt we were drifting pretty far from the main conflict, the fight with the Wicked Queen.
Things get a little convoluted in the process, but there are some clever (and funny!) twists as a result. Riley mostly doesn’t retell stories–instead he takes the characters and gives them a new slant, or explores what might have happened to them after the traditional story ended. Their quest takes them to the Fairy Homeland (which has fallen under a Sleeping Beauty-style curse, thorns and all), into a slightly twisted Neverland, onto Blackbeard’s ship and under the sea, searching for a little mermaid.Īs you can tell, this followed the style of the first book, mashing together familiar fairy tales and classic fantasy. The second book, Twice Upon a Time, opens with the three of them searching for answers about May’s past, and for a way to defeat the Wicked Queen. The first book introduced us to Jack, who considers himself more clever than heroic May, a girl from our world who suddenly landed in Jack’s land of fairy tales and Philip, a very proper handsome prince. And I thought I’d better plunge quickly before I forgot the details of the characters and the plot twists! I didn’t love the later books either, but I do think they improved as they went, and overall I found the trilogy to be a pretty fun ride.
I didn’t love it, but it had some intriguing parts to the ending, so I decided to go ahead and plunge into the second and third books in the trilogy. Somewhere earlier during the Once Upon a Time challenge this year, I read Half Upon a Time by James Riley.
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