Once Upon a Winter's Night by Dennis McKiernan

Title: Once Upon a Winter's Night

Author: Dennis McKiernan

Pages: 380

Finished: October 25, 2017

First Sentence: They lived in a one-room stone cottage on the edge of Faery, there where the world ends and the mystical realm begins, there where golden sunshine abruptly becomes twilight all silver and grey, there where night on one side instead of the other is darkness, sometimes absolute, sometimes illumined with a glorious scatter of bright stars and silvery moonlight, sometimes illumined by small, dancing luminosities atwinkle among hoary trees, there where low, swampy lands and crofters' fields and shadowed forests on this side change on that side into misty fens and untilled meadows and deep, dark, mysterious woods.

Summary: The Prince of the Summerwood proposes marriage to Camille, the daughter of a poor farmer who lives on the edge of Faery. His scheming, unhappy wife accepts for her, and thus Camille travels to fairy on the back of a giant bear. There she spends her days with her bear and nights with her prince, though she never sees his face. Upon traveling back home, her mother convinces her to light a candle to see his face. When she does, a giant wind carries Camille's prince and the entire household away. It's up to Camille to travel through Faery to the place east of the sun and west of the moon where she can hopefully free the Prince of the Summerwood from a curse.

Thoughts: This is an adult retelling of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, set against a backdrop of a larger series. I liked that Camille actually built a relationship with Prince Alain. It made the idea of going to find her true love that much easier.

But Camille herself bugged me. I had no problem with her being so clever earlier in the book. Her ability to beat him at chess, her ability to solve riddles. All very good. However, it seemed like all her cleverness left her when she went on her quest to save Alain.

I wasn't a huge fan of the writing either. The author was trying to sound like he was writing a bardic tale, only the lilt didn't really work in prose writing. That being said, I'm interested in how the rest of this series turns out and will probably find reason to read the other four.

Read for my Fairy Tale Challenge.