Never After [Mass Market Paperback]

I was afraid that I would not like this book at first, but as soon as I met the main heroine, Vevila, I was hooked...

The story starts out with a prince, who can only marry someone of equal or higher rank, on the hunt for a princess. He unfortunately lives during a time of severe princess shortages. He reads about a princess, cursed into eternal sleep, and goes on a quest to rescue her with his kiss. But even the best scribes can blow it, as the prince finds out. It's not a princess, but three identical princes who need a royal to awaken them with a kiss. But there is a lovely maiden asleep in their castle, so our prince, Athelstan, asks his cousin, Vevila, to break the curse for him. Since this will take her away from all her suitors, handsome yet boring certainly included, Vevila agrees. But the princes are guarded by their fairy godmother, and she will allow no one to kiss them until they have undergone a princess test...or two. So Vevila is locked up with a pile of straw and ordered to spin it into gold...and that's only the beginning.

Includes spoofs of The Frog Prince, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, and lots more. It was hilarious...especially the fairy godmother who happens to resemble a wicked witch and is slightly, well, nuts really. Try this book! It's great.

A rather dim-witted but nice prince finds an enchanted vine-covered castle full of sleeping people including a very beautiful woman that he falls for. In this castle, though, it is a prince that needs kissed and awakened before this beauty and the rest of the castle can be roused. Against her will, he recruits his smart, tomboyish cousin, Vevila, (whom he finds trying to run away from her suitors) to help him wake the prince with her kiss. From that point, much of the story focusses on the strong-willed Princess Vevila and the Princess Tests she is put through by the prince's "protectress", a fairy godmother with a few psychiatric problems. A mysterious swamp dweller, a cute, nameless, short man, an imposter perfect princess, a wicked stepmother desperate to find princes for her daughters, and a trio of pompous, greedy wizards round out the cast.

There is a lot of story packed into this small package! There are shades of Sleeping Beauty, the Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin, The Princess and the Pea, Cinderella and more, all with a bit of humor and a twist. And they all lived happily ever after...