Letters to Zell

What is it with everything being 'a novel' again? It's
oddly 19th century.

All is not well in Grimmland. The princesses Rory, CeCi and Zell (Briar Rose/Aurora/Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Rapunzel) have all finished their pages and get to live the rest of their lives as their happy ever after, but Bianca (Snow White) is troubled by her own pages and chafing at the restrictions on her freedom. When Zell and her family suddenly up sticks to Oz to run a Unicorn Sanctuary, it is the start of a major upheaval in the group which wil have potentially catastrophic consequences for all the beings in the lands of imagination.

Camille Griep's debut novel treads the well-worn yellow brick road of fairytale reimagining, but the quirky, backstage antics approach - the tale itself is represented by a princess's pages, the book is about what happens around and after them - is fresh. These fairytale characters exist in a world created by human imagination, and they know it, having the ability to cross into the real world to visit Disneyland for giggles and culture shock. The truth of their 'happy ever after' is that Rory is traumatised by the loss of her actual true love and his replacement with a boorish lug, CeCi deplores the loss of cooking from her life, and Bianca is a bi-curious free spirit whose pages require her to plan an execution into her wedding.

Griep expands on this through an epistolary format, presenting the unfolding events in an overlapping series of letters, each one providing an alternate point of view on something in the last before adding something new. It's a not unsuccessful mechanism - it was the primary means of writing for a century or so, after all - but it has flaws, and while the relationship between the princesses is portrayed as sufficiently close that the sometimes confessional tone is appropriate, for my money the immersion falters from not including any of Zell's return correspondence, especially when references to it are made and have to be in the counter-naturalistic format of 'as you say in your letter...'

Or is it just that email has changed epistolary expectations? In retrospect, it could be that. After all, it's less unreasonable to reiterate something said in a letter that someone might have written a month ago and may well not have a copy of.

Anyway, it's not going to turn the genre on its head, but Letters to Zell presents a relatively fresh approach to fairy tales, with princesses learning to define themselves outside their relationship and happy endings and princes who are varied and realised characters in their own right, but serve primarily as props to the princesses' stories.