You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.25 AVERAGE
3.25 AVERAGE
Trigger warnings: suicide ideation, emotional abuse.
This was a wonderful book. It's retelling of Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, where they all are friends, living in a magic fairy tale world and traveling to the real world. CeCi (Cinderella), Bianca (Snow White) and Rory (Sleeping Beauty) send letters to Zell (Rapunzel) who has moved away with her family.
This is the after of "they lived happily ever after". Many problems were unsolved in these stories and really, the endings of these princesses were far from ideal. CeCi wants to go to the real world and study culinary arts. Bianca wants to explore and try everything. Rory just follows them along at first, but she has her own adventures.
The three of them are very interesting and develop characters. They struggle with what their fairy tale society tells them what they should want and what they really want. The book deals with finding yourself and your passion. At the end, they all take their own decisions.CeCi realizes that she doesn’t want to have children and opens her own restaurant. Bianca moves to the real world to live with her beautiful girlfriend. Zell leaves Jason because she realizes she is not happy with him anymore.
The book shows how powerful and beautiful friendship and platonic love is. These women fight and get angry, but never give up on each other. I loved how each marriage was very different. CeCi has problems with her husband, but they solved them, they talk and get to a better place. Bianca and her husband are actually friends and don't have romantic feelings. Zell doesn’t want to be with hers and leaves him.
They also talk about forgiveness, especially to other women. Which I really like.
On purpose, I decided not to mention Rory’s story because it’s actually very sad.Her husband is an asshole and she takes a sleeping potion at the end to wake up in 100 years. And although it is not suicide she does it because she feels alone, tired and lost. It is not the same, she’s sleeping because of magic and she will wake up eventually, but I wish, I don’t know, that she had known she is loved.
It is a very bittersweet story, but it has a hopeful ending. So yeah, if you want a fantasy book with female friendship and a bisexual princess getting her happy ending, give Letters to Zell a try.
This was a wonderful book. It's retelling of Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, where they all are friends, living in a magic fairy tale world and traveling to the real world. CeCi (Cinderella), Bianca (Snow White) and Rory (Sleeping Beauty) send letters to Zell (Rapunzel) who has moved away with her family.
This is the after of "they lived happily ever after". Many problems were unsolved in these stories and really, the endings of these princesses were far from ideal. CeCi wants to go to the real world and study culinary arts. Bianca wants to explore and try everything. Rory just follows them along at first, but she has her own adventures.
The three of them are very interesting and develop characters. They struggle with what their fairy tale society tells them what they should want and what they really want. The book deals with finding yourself and your passion. At the end, they all take their own decisions.
The book shows how powerful and beautiful friendship and platonic love is. These women fight and get angry, but never give up on each other. I loved how each marriage was very different. CeCi has problems with her husband, but they solved them, they talk and get to a better place. Bianca and her husband are actually friends and don't have romantic feelings. Zell doesn’t want to be with hers and leaves him.
They also talk about forgiveness, especially to other women. Which I really like.
On purpose, I decided not to mention Rory’s story because it’s actually very sad.
It is a very bittersweet story, but it has a hopeful ending. So yeah, if you want a fantasy book with female friendship and a bisexual princess getting her happy ending, give Letters to Zell a try.
Man this book took forever for me to finish. At first I really liked it. I liked that the story was told from the perspective of Bianca (Snow White), Ceci (Cinderella), and Rory (Sleeping Beauty) writing letters to their friend Zell (Rapunzel). The first three princesses travel to and from “the outside” which is our world and start to discover what they really want from life and later have to struggle to tell their loved ones. Overall, it was okay, but not amazing. It was kind of slow in the middle.
I definitely liked it, there were some cute "Grimm help me" and I thought the ideas behind how this world would function were quite interesting. I personally didn't forsee the end, but that's just me. I feel somewhere between a 3 and 4 but I'm not sure where I am leaning
**You can see this full review and more at Book Briefs: http://bookbriefs.net**Where to start with this one? Letters to Zell is a hilarious and zany ride that takes what we knew of fairy tale princesses and turns it on its' head. Told in letter format, Letters to Zell starts off with a letter to Zell (Rapunzel) from Ceci (Cinderella- but don't call her that! She hates it!). Apparently, Zell up and left her princess friends to run off and tend to Unicorns. Zell, Ceci, Bianca (Snow White) and Rory (Sleeping Beauty) are all a part of a book club, and the other princesses are not too happy that Zell left them without any notice.
The letters drop you right in the middle of their world, and it takes a good bit of time to get your bearings. Since the book is told in letter format, and alternates between the princesses, the author- Camille Greip, has to weave details into each letter. Although this method took longer than a couple setting the stage paragraphs or even chapters would have, it felt more authentic to the story telling method. If these princesses were really writing letters to their friend, they wouldn't explain the world they all grew up in, in one go around. (If my friend wrote me a letter and described Florida, it would be one bizarre letter.) So even though this often left me a bit confused until I could gather enough details to paint a picture of the world, I kind of liked it. It made me feel like I was on a scavenger hunt of sorts.
Let's talk a little bit about the letters. They completely cracked me up! I loved Binaca's. She is so crass. All of her letters started with "Important F-ing Correspondence from Snow B. White" Bianca is also still living out the pages of her story, so her letters were of particular interest to me. The book on a whole was a lot of fun to read. I loved the concept of these princesses bonding together and doing something so ordinary as drinking (a lot!) and having a book club. Parts of the story did seem to drag on a bit, and I had to put the book down a few times and pick it up again later, but overall, I enjoyed this story.
Letters To Zell reminded me of the song "Fairytale" by Sara Bareilles. Where all of the Fairy tales have taken a decidedly less happy(and maybe more realistic?) turn than their happily ever after. Each of these princesses are trying to figure out what they really want to do with their lives. I think this is a great book for people in their 20s to read, because I feel like we all are trying to figure out our passions and what we really want to do. And I think everyone has at some point wondered, or known someone who has wondered, if the path they were on was the right one. This takes that idea, throws in some adventure, princesses and a whole lot of wine, and takes us on a journey to answer that questions. And there are a lot of laughs, and some behavior unbecoming of fairytale princesses, along the way.
This review was originally posted on Book Briefs
The letters drop you right in the middle of their world, and it takes a good bit of time to get your bearings. Since the book is told in letter format, and alternates between the princesses, the author- Camille Greip, has to weave details into each letter. Although this method took longer than a couple setting the stage paragraphs or even chapters would have, it felt more authentic to the story telling method. If these princesses were really writing letters to their friend, they wouldn't explain the world they all grew up in, in one go around. (If my friend wrote me a letter and described Florida, it would be one bizarre letter.) So even though this often left me a bit confused until I could gather enough details to paint a picture of the world, I kind of liked it. It made me feel like I was on a scavenger hunt of sorts.
Let's talk a little bit about the letters. They completely cracked me up! I loved Binaca's. She is so crass. All of her letters started with "Important F-ing Correspondence from Snow B. White" Bianca is also still living out the pages of her story, so her letters were of particular interest to me. The book on a whole was a lot of fun to read. I loved the concept of these princesses bonding together and doing something so ordinary as drinking (a lot!) and having a book club. Parts of the story did seem to drag on a bit, and I had to put the book down a few times and pick it up again later, but overall, I enjoyed this story.
Letters To Zell reminded me of the song "Fairytale" by Sara Bareilles. Where all of the Fairy tales have taken a decidedly less happy(and maybe more realistic?) turn than their happily ever after. Each of these princesses are trying to figure out what they really want to do with their lives. I think this is a great book for people in their 20s to read, because I feel like we all are trying to figure out our passions and what we really want to do. And I think everyone has at some point wondered, or known someone who has wondered, if the path they were on was the right one. This takes that idea, throws in some adventure, princesses and a whole lot of wine, and takes us on a journey to answer that questions. And there are a lot of laughs, and some behavior unbecoming of fairytale princesses, along the way.
This review was originally posted on Book Briefs
3.75 stars
Review to come
Rapunzel has upped and left Grimmland with her husband and kids to help run a unicorn sanctuary in Oz. And now Cinderella, Aurora and Snow White are left to figure out what to do without her. Suddenly Zell's leaving sparks the idea of doing more in the other Princesses' heads. CiCi wants to be a chef, which means taking lessons outside in the real world. Snow White suddenly realises her wedding may not be the be all and end all of her life and she could be free to love whoever she wants. And Aurora, well she discovers coffee and that maybe her husband isn't her happily ever after after all. Letters to Zell explores the bumps that come after the happily ever after is sealed and how sometime you have to work pretty hard to get it.
If you liked Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, I think you might like this book. While Chapters to Zell is not quite as satirical as Beauty Queens, it definitely that over-the-topness I associate with Libba Bray's book. The girls are loud and dramatic and they, and the world they live in, have ideals about how they should live and what they should look like and it's a stretch to try and change these. But the more the girls travel through the portal, the more their eyes open to other things and their real dreams. They begin to fight for what they want - CiCi for her cooking classes, Bianca for her freedom and Rory for some magic spell that make her life better than it should be.
I thought it was interesting that we never really got to meet Zell. Just heard about what she was like by the letters the other characters wrote to her. She was definitely some ideal fairy princess until the end when CiCi had a go at her and we discover that Zell isn't actually as perfect as we think. I liked that there was some diversity to the books as well, and there was never any hoo-haa about Bianca's choice of partner Outside. I loved that relationship, though it seemed very rushed. I really enjoyed Cici's relationship dynamic with Edmund who at first I thought a bit snobbish and then turned out to be thoughtful and understanding. I also loved the princesses' reactions to their Disneyland counter-parts.Definite LOL moments.
This book will throw any ideas you have about your fairy princesses out of the water. So stop thinking about the singing Disney versions, and think more along the lines of the kick-butt princesses we see in Once Upon A Time, cause that's what these girls are mixed in with a little bit of LA-grit.
Review to come
Rapunzel has upped and left Grimmland with her husband and kids to help run a unicorn sanctuary in Oz. And now Cinderella, Aurora and Snow White are left to figure out what to do without her. Suddenly Zell's leaving sparks the idea of doing more in the other Princesses' heads. CiCi wants to be a chef, which means taking lessons outside in the real world. Snow White suddenly realises her wedding may not be the be all and end all of her life and she could be free to love whoever she wants. And Aurora, well she discovers coffee and that maybe her husband isn't her happily ever after after all. Letters to Zell explores the bumps that come after the happily ever after is sealed and how sometime you have to work pretty hard to get it.
If you liked Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, I think you might like this book. While Chapters to Zell is not quite as satirical as Beauty Queens, it definitely that over-the-topness I associate with Libba Bray's book. The girls are loud and dramatic and they, and the world they live in, have ideals about how they should live and what they should look like and it's a stretch to try and change these. But the more the girls travel through the portal, the more their eyes open to other things and their real dreams. They begin to fight for what they want - CiCi for her cooking classes, Bianca for her freedom and Rory for some magic spell that make her life better than it should be.
I thought it was interesting that we never really got to meet Zell. Just heard about what she was like by the letters the other characters wrote to her. She was definitely some ideal fairy princess until the end when CiCi had a go at her and we discover that Zell isn't actually as perfect as we think. I liked that there was some diversity to the books as well, and there was never any hoo-haa about Bianca's choice of partner Outside. I loved that relationship, though it seemed very rushed. I really enjoyed Cici's relationship dynamic with Edmund who at first I thought a bit snobbish and then turned out to be thoughtful and understanding. I also loved the princesses' reactions to their Disneyland counter-parts.Definite LOL moments.
This book will throw any ideas you have about your fairy princesses out of the water. So stop thinking about the singing Disney versions, and think more along the lines of the kick-butt princesses we see in Once Upon A Time, cause that's what these girls are mixed in with a little bit of LA-grit.
This was so entertaining, a great re-imagining of Cinderella, Snow White, Briar Rose, and Rapunzel. Three of the four have already lived through their stories as we know them, and Snow White's wedding is quickly approaching, and they've all realized that maybe fairy tales aren't all they expected them to be (or we expect them to be!) Maybe true love isn't really true, or doesn't last forever, or isn't completely fulfilling. Told in a series of letters from the princesses to Rapunzel (Zell), we get to see how they each come to realize what it is they actually want out of life, even if it isn't what's expected of them. A great reminder that there's more to life than happily ever after.
It's hard for me to dislike a book about fairy tales, and this one isn't even YA. Plus: epistolary.
"Important Fucking Correspondence from Snow B. White."