Short stories by one of my favorite authors. Yay! I didn’t read the last one because I’m working on a re-telling of the same fairy tale and I knew it would Influence me.

This is probably one of my new favorite Robin McKinley books ever. The only thing I can think to describe it as is beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous as a collection.

The first story (The Stolen Princess) was unique and classic with faeries and magic. Robin McKinley tells stories with such a wonderful quality that I couldn't but be entranced and in love with the essence of the story itself. The characters were simple, as was the setting and nothing distracted from the loveliness of the story.

The second story (The Princess and the Frog) made me smile. I've always wanted to rewrite this one myself, and I loved the way McKinley did it. Yet, this usually light-hearted story about a somewhat selfish princess (you have to admit it) suddenly turned into a dark and penetrating story that left me squirming even through my smiles. The villain-- in the 20 pages that I saw him-- was truly frightening, and once again I loved the simpleness and tradition of this story also.

The third story (The Hunting of the Hind) could've very well have been my favorite. This one had the particularly strong female character that I always admire, and this one spoke deeply of the power of love (as cheesey as that sounds). It was saddening and powerful, but of course happy at the end. :)

The forth story (The Twelve Dancing Princesses) was probably the most entrancing and mysterious for me. This one my emotions were confused along with the main characters (the old soldier), and I almost fell in love with that cursed world the Princesses were condemned to. I loved the different perspective this story was told from.

Overall, this book was truly remarkable. If you're a fan of Robin McKinley or even just beautiful fairy tales that we don't see enough today, read this book!

It's been a long time since I've read a Robin McKinley book, but reading this one reminded me that McKinley is an absolute master of fairy tale retellings. I was tempted to give it five stars, but the relative weakness of the title story stopped me. The book contains four stories -- retellings of "The Princess and the Frog" and "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" and two new stories. The best, I thought, were the familiar tales. And "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" was perfection. The language was lush and rich. The soldier was believable and sympathetic. I finished reading it with a satisfied sigh.

Gave up a dozen pages into the second story.

Unfortunately these novellas were nothing like McKinley’s Rose Daughter, which I really liked. Maybe she learned her craft on them. Maybe ... who knows?

Too much telling, too little empathy. Not so much bad as not engaging.

Don't waste your time.

I’ve read this so many times and every time I read it I love it. Elements of horror, melancholia and madness mixed in with fairy tales. Written in such a lovely way.

I did not know that this was several separate retellings of fairy tales.

This book includes four short stories:
_The Stolen princess;(2,5 stars)
_The Princess and the Frog (2 stars, the story was just too short!)
_The Hunting of the Hind (3 stars..)
_The Twelve Dancing Princesses (3,5 stars)

Okay i'll admit that a three star rating for Robin Mckinley writing is absurd. She's one of the great ones able to transport me to magical worlds, with her beautiful smooth writing.

I guess these short stories are told in the classical/traditional fairy tale way, and after having read so many fairy tales retellings i can't help comparing this one, with other tales i've read...namely Wildwood Dancing. A retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses"/ "Princess and the Frog" fairy tales. Which i guess is unfair...

For those who like "classical" fairy tales (with love at first sight..no character development, and things like that) i think you'll enjoy this quite a lot. For others who have been "spoiled" by a certain modernization that has re-written today retellings of fairy tales, this will probably rank a little lower....despite the beautiful writing.

I really enjoy reading this, though I can't say there's much that's objectively good about these stories. They're poorly paced and a little senseless, and sometimes even stupid. Bad guys are defeated too easily and quickly and all of the endings feel anti-climatic. Each story could be summed up as "this girl was really hot and beautiful, and she looked at this guy, who was also hot and beautiful, and the evil went up in smoke, and then there was a wedding."

However, because it's Robin McKinley, the writing has a really atmospheric old-world quality that you can't really find anywhere else. There's also a glimmer of McKinley's brilliance here (particularly in the depiction of Alora and Gilvan's relationship in the first story) that hints at what makes The Blue Sword and Hero and the Crown so great. And even though the romances were slightly gimmicky, I still enjoyed them for what they were, because I personally like the tropes McKinley plays with in her books. So I'd definitely recommend this to die-hard McKinley fans, especially fans of her older work (if they haven't already read this), but would hesitate to give it to someone who only knows YA fantasy from the last 10-15 years.

[3.5 stars really]

The Stolen Princess: Unlike the other stories in this book, this one is an original: McKinley provides a nice build-up but doesn’t really deliver a payoff. The story is set in the last human kingdom before Faerie, a special place that the faeries are happy to help, except of course when they are abducting baby boys and teenage girls. (But not too often, and never more than one per family, and no only children, so it’s almost ok.) This abduction, from which nobody ever returns, is set up as a big mystery, indeed the defining mystery of Faerie, so when the central character, Princess Linadel, is (as the story requires) abducted, we expect that the mystery will be solved. But it isn’t at all: in fact, nothing is really resolved, and the fact that Linadel manages to return from Faerie, as nobody has ever done before, raises more questions than answers (for instance, how does she manage to do it?). The final merging of the kingdoms provides an elegant solution to the story, but neatly sidesteps all the interesting questions the first part raises.
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The Hunting of the Hind: I assume this is a retelling — McKinley certainly writes it in high-fairytale style — although if it is, I’m not familiar with the original. The story offers a chance for Princess Korah to save her big brother, who has fallen under the spell of an evil wizard: the wizard does this using the titular hind, who drives all who see her mad, and who is in turn a woman under a spell. As in “The Stolen Princess”, the buildup is well-executed, but the payoff lacks punch: in this case, the climactic confrontation with the evil wizard is a bit of an anti-climax.
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The Princess and the Frog: This is a nice rewrite of the old fairy-tale: McKinley transforms it from a story about punishing a spoiled girl to something with depth. There are real characters and a real story: the princess is no longer just a brat, the frog is not a jerk, and there’s a villain to be defeated. Given the parameters of the original, this is probably about as good as it can be made without transforming it beyond recognition.
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The Twelve Dancing Princesses: This, on the other hand, is a fairly faithful retelling. Which means, unfortunately, that we get no additional insight into the princesses, or any of the other aspects of the story. It’s competently done but doesn’t really add anything to the original.

Felt a little like Spindle's End, but not distinctly McKinley. I keep hoping to find a book that captures the magic of The Blue Sword and Chalice, but Intisar Khanani and Elisabeth George Speare and Shannon Hale keep doing that better than McKinley herself...

Ah well. All in all, a decent collection of retellings that felt like a grown-up version of Gail Carson Levine, with a little more ethereal terror and a little less whimsy. I liked it. I liked the audiobook reader. Probably the Princess & the Frog story was my favorite (but it needed more!).

Robin McKinley writes a mean fairy tale, whether she's reworking an old classic ("The Twelve Dancing Princesses," "The Princess and the Frog", "The Golden Hind") or writing her own ("The Stolen Princess"). I love how atmospheric these stories are: you step into each story slowly until you're fully submerged, almost ensorcelled yourself.

The characters and their histories are fleshed out well beyond the scope of the original fairy tales. The soldier in "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" becomes an old campaigner who can't go back to his old life; the court in "The Princess and the Frog" has a powerful visitor who has overstayed his welcome. The women are all still as beautiful as the moon and the men are all stalwart and true, but I'd be willing to attribute that to the fairy tales, rather than to McKinley. The only consistent weakness in the stories was plot-related. It's most apparent in "The Golden Hind," when the princess visits the enchanter in order to free her brother and the other hunters. There's a moment where she walks into the chamber to see him, and then in the moment after she's free. In fact, the climax seems to be missing from many of the stories, because the magic in each of them is too mysterious for it to be clear what's going on. The two brothers dueling in "The Princess and the Frog" has the same sort of lackluster ending, and I actually paged back while reading "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" to see what the requirement was to break the enchantment. It's stated early on that the soldier only needs to speak truly of what he's seen, but that's pretty boring in practice given that the shadow court seems so powerful and nefarious. But ultimately, the stories are so well-written that I didn't really mind.

The stories are good, but I think McKinley was channeling Hans Christian Andersen. These are the most melancholy fairy tales imaginable. Oh, the heroines find instant, deep, and perfect love with their princes, but the sadness of parents losing children is all through this. Everyone is serious, and earnest, and staunch, and truly, I expected horrible things to happen to them, even in the stories I knew.

Library copy.