Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 16, 2007

Enchanted forest series by Patricia Wrede

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 3:26 PM

So many books… So little time…

As you know I love reading and read a lot of books. So I thought that I should share my experiences with you regarding the books I have read and liked or disliked… I am starting a somewhat regular feature where I talk about some of the books that I have read recently with commentary/thoughts. I will try not to make any spoilers but no guaranties. 🙂

First off in the series are the Enchanted Forest books by Patricia Wrede. (because I just finished re-reading it). This series is a set of four novels out of which I loved the first three. The last one wasn’t up to her usual standards but is worth a read just to gain closer. Each of the novels focuses on a different character in the story and while all of them do interact the personalities of each of the characters make the books unique.

The first book is called “Dealing with Dragons” and focuses on Princess Cimorene. Princess Cimorene is not your usual princess, she finds most of the stuff ‘appropriate’ for princesses too boring and is interested more in learning about magic, politics and sword-fighting than learning embroidery or how loud its permissible to scream when being kidnapped by giants.

When her parents are completely tired of her, they decide to get her married so that she is someone else’s problem. Unfortunately she doesn’t like the guy they want her to get married to so she decides to run away and become a dragon’s princesses. So she sets off with her best crown and a set of 5 clean handkerchief’s to find a dragon. She does find a group of dragons and convinces one of them to keep her as their princess. Now that she has been ‘kidnapped’ by a dragon, heroes and knights keep coming to rescue her and she has to run them off with a lot of insults and threats. The knights think she is crazy and the dragons find her amusing. Then a group of wizards start meddling in the dragons affairs so she decides to set things right with some help from a witch, a stone prince and a couple of princesses from other dragons.

The book is extremely funny and best of all its a light read. If you are tired and don’t really want to concentrate on a book to keep track of plot lines and characters then this book fits the bill.

The second book “Searching for Dragons”, sort of picks up where the first one ends but focuses on Mendanbar who is the king of the enchanted forest instead. He is a twenty something man who thinks princesses are silly things with nothing between their ears but air. But then he runs into Cimorene when he goes to meet the dragons about a wizard problem and has to change his mind. They both decide to go look for Kazul (her dragon) who has gone missing. On the way they meet giants, ride a flying carpet, meet a few interesting people and melt some wizards.

The third book “Calling On Dragons” focuses on Morwen the witch who is a minor character in the first book and a major one in the second. In this book the wizards are back and are causing trouble again and the first indication Morwen has of all this is a 7 feet high rabbit named killer who turns up in her backyard. Over the course of the book the rabbit turns into a donkey and grows wings because he just couldn’t stop himself of taking a bite of anything that looked tasty no matter how many times others told him not to. The book is somewhat slower than the first two but is still fun.

In the end of the book there’s a stalemate and that leads into the last book of the series called “Talking To Dragons”. Can’t tell you much about this book without spoiling it. The books reads completely different than the other three and if I didn’t know better I would say that it was written by a different writer. Didn’t like it as much as the others.

Try it out. You just might like it.

– Suramya

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Powered by WordPress