I love a good fairy tale.

Once upon a time, there was a series of reference books titled the Book of Knowledge. Not the 2005 Book of Knowledge you find in the library or the one you might upgrade on CD every year to keep a current information library to satisfy your academic needs or your intellectual curiosity. No, this Book of Knowledge was put together early in the 20th century and bought by my grandparents for my mother and uncle. It had a few academic references which are charmingly out of date, and some historical data which has a different slant than what you read today. But what made it so different is that this edition had quaint folk trivia about what people ate in different countries, quirky articles like how to prepare lunch for a toddler...and fairy tales. Inside the black and gold leather bindings of that old book of knowledge were various ancient traditional fantasies that today's children never see--variations of knights and royalty and magic and princesses and fairy godmothers that bear no resemblance to anything we know now. I cut my teeth on these stories where good sometimes triumphed but always a moral followed. So it is with fondness that I see Kai Anderson's Question of Royalty.

The Question of Royalty begins like the Princess and the Pea with the ragged girl seeking shelter from the storm. Rather than having the classical kindly prince's mother who is testing for royal blood with her proverbial stack of mattresses, Kai's story prince, Frederick, has a grasping step-sister. Our Prince's mother had made him make a deathbed promise to marry a girl of royal blood. So that is the story question in the title: can this ragged girl Serena possibly be of royal blood? One of my favorite characters is Mrs. Goode-Heart, certainly a fairy God Mother, and always performing unacknowledged little acts of magical good-heartedness. Everyone should have a Mrs. Good-Heart in their lives, even Serena, who, with her scientific bent, is a bit more modern than conventional maidens.

For anyone who savors their fairy tales, Kai Anderson's The Question of Royalty is not a photocopy of the original tale on which it is based, but it will satisfy that wish, along with delivering an adult dose of erotica that never made it into the old stories. An entertaining read.

Reviewed By Maîtresse
© 2006