The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy, UK edition.

Title: The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom
Author: Christopher Healy
Genre: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Middle Grade
Publisher: Harper Collins (7 June 2012)
Blurb:

PRINCE LIAM. PRINCE FREDERIC. PRINCE DUNCAN. PRINCE GUSTAV.

You’ve never heard of them, have you?

These are the princes who saved Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White and Rapunzel, but you probably just know them all as ‘Prince Charming’. Well, all that is about to change as the hapless princes stumble upon an evil plot and get a second chance to prove themselves true heroes.

Rating: ***** (5 stars)
Review:

The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom is Christopher Healy’s debut novel. It tells the story of the ‘Prince Charming’s from the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel fairy tales.

This is hand’s down the most entertaining and enjoyable book I have read this year. I was literally laughing out loud as I read the book, and I just couldn’t stop smiling.

One of the things that I most loved about this book is that it is littered with illustrations. Sometimes you’ll get a single image to the side of the text to illustrate something  on the page, and other times the image will take up the whole page. All the illustrations are fantastic, and although they were black and white in my edition of the book they were detailed and looked gorgeous.

The narrative of the book was engaging, and at times reminded me a bit of Disney’s Robin Hood (1973) as the narrator talks directly to the reader and even hints at things to come later in the story. The plot was really engaging. I loved the fact that the book re-tells the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel stories but from the prince’s point of view. But more than that, the stories go beyond the happy-ever-after so as a reader we get to see the ‘reality’ of the situation.

If you’ve ever read Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White or Rapunzel, or watched the Disney films then you should definitely pick this book up. Although The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom is aimed at a Middle Grade audience (that’s 9-12 years, I think) anyone (Young Adult, or Adult) will really enjoy this book.