Book Review: Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Release Date: March 18, 2008
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Pages: 344
Received: Library
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads Page

Summary

From Goodreads:

Benevolence is not your typical princess and Princess Ben is certainly not your typical fairy tale. With her parents lost to unknown assassins, Princess Ben ends up under the thumb of the conniving Queen Sophia, who is intent on marrying her off to the first available "specimen of imbecilic manhood." Starved and miserable, locked in the castle's highest tower, Ben stumbles upon a mysterious enchanted room.

So begins her secret education in the magical arts: mastering an obstinate flying broomstick, furtively emptying the castle pantries, setting her hair on fire...

But Ben's private adventures are soon overwhelmed by a mortal threat facing the castle and indeed the entire country. Can Princess Ben save her kingdom from annihilation and herself from permanent enslavement?

Review

Oh just get to it already!

I could have so easily loved Princess Ben. All of the elements I usually adore were there for me: A PRINCESS (that gets the book points right there), a hate-turned-love romance, magic!, and a sprinkling of nods to various fairy tales. What's not to love?

Apparently, Ben. You're not supposed to like Ben all that much in the beginning because this is one of those stories where the character grows to become someone better than who she started out as.

Again, normally I love that--but not when she's unlikable for 3/4 of the book! Her turn around in the final quarter was so rapid that I really had a hard time buying it.

How can a book with magical sparkly light swirls on the cover be boring???

This all could have been much improved had the first 3/4 been more tightly written. And maybe narrated differently. The whole story is told with Ben's first person narration, but she's telling it as an old woman looking back on her life. I found her voice to be stuffy, dull, and lending very little excitement to the tale.

Not only was Ben annoying me, but I was also so bored. When Ben finally started learning magic I thought, "Oh good, magic will make it all better!" but that didn't happen. Honestly, I'm sort of in shock. Magic has never failed me like this before. But for whatever reason, reading along as Ben learned how to conjure water and fire (and spend an equal amount of time cleaning) was about as interesting to me as watching grass grow.

Which is to say, NOT interesting. I'm still confused, but I think part of the reason this was so boring was because Ben was completely alone during all of these lessons. She didn't have an old wizard or a sweet witch or a handsom anyone to teach her, mock her, or provide witty banter with her. It was just Ben.

Also, there was no conflict or distinct experiences between her lessons. It was always just, "Open book, read spell, try spell, master spell!" Sometimes she would say the equivalent to, "I practiced for months" between "try" and "master" but that isn't very exciting either.

Heroine replacement, please?

Ben spends the first 3/4 of the book as a sulky, self-absorbed, sheltered little girl with no regard for the kingdom she will inherit and zero social skills.

And I don't mean she's shy. I mean she's rude. Boorish, even.

I would have thought I might have sympathized and related to Ben a little bit over her tendency to over-eat. Because, you know, I like food too, so we have that in common.

But, jeez, can you say obsessed? (Well, ok, to be fair, yes, she kind of is. Ben doesn't just like eating, she eats as a way of coping with stress and the loss of her parents). Ben is significatly overweight and focuses much of her energy on stealing food after her guardian puts her on a diet. Instead of being sympathetic, Ben came across as a self-indulgent whiner.

Besides, couldn't she have done something more interesting with her magic than learn how to sneak into the kitchen at night?? She found secret passageways for crying out loud, and all she could think of to do with them was steal food?! I was practically in the depths of despair over such a tragedy of missed opportunities.

By the time she became someone I *might* consider as a lunch table companion, I'd already spent way too much time wishing she'd bite it (and I don't mean food).

But I really could have loved this book

If I forget about Ben and all the boring parts there's actually a pretty awesome story here. It's exciting and adventurous and even reminds me of Gail Carson Levine with both authors' inventive takes on magic and creatures. I also really liked the world building and I pretty much loved--or was at least interested in reading about--every character (with the exception, of course, of Ben. Though even Ben got a lot better in the final quarter).

The mystery of Ben's missing father was also creatively written with enough suspicion thrown around that I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. And there was even a scene that made me laugh out loud! (For those who have read Princess Ben already: mud). Plus, it was fun seeing all the different fairy tales woven into the story.

Bottom line

I'm very glad I read Pica's review or I probably would have DNF-ed during part 1. Pica echoed my own lack of enthuasiasm with the beginning of the book, so I decided to keep reading because she assured me it would get better. And she was right!

Even with all my complaints, I'm still happy I read Princess Ben and had the experience of the story (even if I didn't love the storytelling). I'll probably even re-read it now that I know which parts to skip over to get to the good stuff (part 1-mostly skip, part 2-skip a little, part 3-don't skip much, part 4- no skipping).

Princess Ben is a standalone. 

Explanation of rating system: Star Rating Key 

Do you have any questions about Princess Ben that I haven't addressed? 
Feel free to ask in the comments!

Looking for another book like this? 

You might like: 

Click on the covers to go to my reviews.

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Book Review: Wisdom's Kiss by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Wisdom's Kiss by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Release Date: September 12, 2011
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children
Pages: 314
Received: ARC from publisher, via NetGalley
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads Page

Summary

From Goodreads:

Princess Wisdom, known as Dizzy, longs for a life of adventure far beyond the staid old kingdom of Montagne.

Tips, a soldier, longs to keep his true life secret from his family.

Fortitude, an orphaned maid, longs only for Tips.

These three passionate souls might just attain their dreams while preserving Montagne from certain destruction, if only they can tolerate each other long enough to come up with a plan. Tough to save the world when you can't even be in the same room together.

Magic, cunning, and one very special cat join forces in this hilarious, extraordinary tale by the author of Dairy Queen and Princess Ben. An incredibly creative tale told with diaries, memoirs, encyclopedia entries, letters, biographies, even a stage play, all woven together into a grand adventure.

Review

What could have been a great book

Fantasy and fairy tale lover that I am, I was really looking forward to Wisdom's Kiss. Unfortunately, I didn't like it nearly as much as I was hoping I would. There was so much potential, but in almost every regard Wisdom's Kiss fell short for me.

I've heard Wisdom's Kiss compared to The Princess Bride and, yeah, I can see the comparison, but I think they are more on the same spectrum than the same level. I mean, it's The Princess Bride for crying out loud. Those are some pretty big shoes to fill. But, alas, I didn't find the wit of Wisdom's Kiss nearly as amusing. It was more in retrospect that I though, "Huh, I guess that was clever" but I wasn't all that impressed while reading. 

WWMCD Test score? ZERO

One of the biggest drawbacks for me were the multiple narrators. You know, I'm a huge fan of books with multiple narrators, but I don't think the device was used successfully in Wisdom's Kiss.

The book is short, and with eight (yes, eight) different points of view all vying for attention, Catherine Gilbert Murdock needed to make every word count to bring her characters to life. Ideally this kind of switching POV style is used to  provide deeper insight into the characters, but it actually did the complete opposite for me.

Traits like making one of her characters a poor speller or another character who frequently uses abbreviations were the only real differentiating characteristics in the various voices. I had very little sense of who these characters were as people beyond their stereotypical and surface-level characteristics. 

And you know what? For the most part, I didn't care. With the exception of the grandmother and her cat (who weren't even that great but, come on, I'm a sucker for a feisty grandmother and a magical cat, no matter how shallow their development), I didn't really like any of them.

They all seemed flighty, silly, spineless, and shallow. I also couldn't get on board with the actions of the characters we're supposed to like. Maybe I would have liked things more if I had known this would be the type of book where I'm not really supposed to love and identify with any one character. Think more like Shakespeare's Hamlet where you're (spoiler for Hamlet) sort of glad they're all dead in the end (or at least *I* was, though I love that play).

Everything but the kitchen sink

I mentioned the eight narrators, but what you also need to know is that these aren't your traditional first-person narratives. Letters, excerpts from memoirs, play transcripts, diary entries, and even encyclopedia articles are used to tell the story. Yeah, I know. Creative, but I don't think it was all that effective. But the chapters are all very short, so you'll probably be able to fly through.

Many of the narratives felt more pointless than not. Every time I slogged through an encyclopedia chapter or one of those excruciating chapters from the pompous but clueless mentor's memoirs (that I think are supposed to be funny, but they annoyed me) I kept thinking that this would be so much better if it was written in a straight up third person narrative. Then I wouldn't have had to sift through a bunch of irrelevant stuff just to get to the one or two lines of relevant information in those sections.

And, ok, I'm a big baby when it comes to "slogging" and "sifting" because these chapters are extremely short so it's not like you'll be bogged down by endless pages of digressions. You'll just be bogged down by a few pages. Still, to me it felt like trying to get a straight answer from one of my elderly friends who likes to turn what could easily be a one sentence response into a rambling story about her life that only loosely ties back to the point of my question. Eventually.

The more relevant sections were better, but they also suffered as a result of the narration choices. Like, ok, take for example the excerpts from what was supposed to be one of the character's future memoirs. You know what a memoir is, right? First person, story of your life kinda deal. So why were they written in the third person?? And why did it sound nothing like the character? These chapters felt like they were born to be written with a third person omniscient narrator, but are warped and stunted by the confines of the "memoir" gimmick.

Spinoff series

I haven't read Princess Ben, but I do know that it is a fantasy story about a girl named Benevolence and there is magic involved. Now, nothing on Wisdom's Kiss says that it's a sequel or even related to Princess Ben, but I'm using my awesome powers of reasoning and guessing they're at the very least companion novels.

The grandmother in Wisdom's Kiss is named Ben and often alludes to adventures in the past in such a way that I get the impression the reader should be familiar with those escapades. Some scenes and lines even felt like their sole purpose was to make the reader think, "Yup, good old Ben, she's even awesome as a grandma!"

Except, she's not. Not really. She's nice I guess, but she doesn't do anything in Wisdom's Kiss that makes her particularly standout. She's even kind of weak at a few points (which totally contradicted the few times when she was awesome) and I had to scold her for being stupid on more than one Major Point.

There were also things like vague references to magic use and events surrounding such use that mean nothing to me and aren't supported in Wisdom's Kiss in any concrete way. The lack of support in Wisdom's Kiss for things that I can only guess are Important Events in Princess Ben made Wisdom's Kiss feel like a pale shadow overly relying upon and trying to capture the magic of the past without offering anything new.

And, really, I didn't find enough in Wisdom's Kiss's plot to justify itself. It's a great idea, but it isn't fleshed out nearly as much as I would have liked it to have been. As it stands, the sparseness of the characters and simplicity of the plot are enough to prop up a fun but forgettable short story. It is only through the narrative gimmick that Wisdom's Kiss can be stretched to novel-length (if not novel depth).

That said, the story had an almost Shakespearean feel that I did like and a resolution that, while I personally found it unsatisfying, is original.

Bottom line

If the gimmicky narrative style had been changed to a more traditional approach, then I think the characters and plot would have been given the focus and expansion necessary to have made me really like this book. Every character had the potential to be incredibly interesting (if not always likable) if they had only been developed further.

Perhaps if you enter into the book with more appropriate expectations of depth then you'll like Wisdom's Kiss more than I did. I also think readers will like this book if they click with the narration style. If you're a fan of Shakespeare or The Princess Bride then you might want to check this out.

I can see that Catherine Gilbert Murdock has the ability to be a great writer reminiscent of Gail Carson Levine or Jessica Day George. I'm disappointed that my first experience with her is through a book that feels like it received the attention of a creative exercise instead of the care of a real novel. Still, even though I was sorely disappointed with Wisdom's Kiss, the first thing I did after finishing it was to place a library hold on Princess Ben, which I am pretty confident I will enjoy.

Explanation of rating system: Star Rating Key 

Do you have any questions about Wisdom's Kiss that I haven't addressed? 
Feel free to ask in the comments!

Looking for another book like this? 

You might like: 

Click on the cover to go to my review.

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