Review: The Stepsister Scheme

So I was recently shamed into decreasing my to-read stack.

The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim C. Hines, is a recently-published fantasy novel (January 2009), the first of the Princess series, which is set in a fantasy milieu based loosely on several classic fairy tales. (The tales exist as tales within the setting; and oh, yes, there are Fairies.)

The protagonists, despite being Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, act more like the protagonists of modern fantasy rather than those of a fairy-tale; they are exceptions, though, for all the antagonists and most of the supporting cast could have stepped in from the dark cobwebbed corners of pre-Perraultian folklore. (Students of which will probably recognize Talia by the name alone.)

The setting is particularly interesting: there is a Fairyland, and there is a treaty between it and the human kingdom of Lorindar; but Fairyland is still made of fairies, who are themselves made of mischief and malice and that subtle alien quality — they are not human, and with few exceptions it is not possible to forget this. This makes for interesting politics, to say the least.

Ms. Yolen, on the blurb on the back cover, says it "turns fairy-tale conventions upside down". She does know her fairy tales, but I'm still going to have to respectfully disagree; while it's true enough that the princess-protagonists are inversions, subversions, extensions and extrapolations of their respective source materials, and while much of the tale is modern in flavor and in flow, where the conventions of fairy-tales are used, they are played straight.*

Summary: 1, on a scale of 1 to 1. I'm looking forward to the upcoming second book of the trilogy.

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* Page 283 counts as "played straight", and damn the pun.