Ella Enchanted

Ella Enchanted is a book that I picked up by accident.  I was running wild in the Newbery Medal section with my gift card (thanks, mom!) and nabbing anything that didn't look really, really boring.  It wasn't until I got home that I realized it was an honor book and not a medal winner at all.  Oh, well, somebody found it interesting enough to make a movie out of it... so I pushed that mental picture of Beloved out of my head and decided to read it anyway.  

What a great surprise!  I had already seen the movie and found it fairly mediocre.  It's the kind of movie you put a ten-year-old girls' slumber party in front of with a bowl of popcorn and jog off to your room, relieved.  Not bad, just not that great.  Ella Enchanted, however, is a classic case of great-book-ruined-by-Hollywood: I cite Jurassic Park, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the entire Little House series as evidence of this sad phenomenon.  If you thought those movies/TV were good, well, read the book and you'll see what I mean.  (By the way, Beloved  is NOT in this category- it belongs to the rotten-book-worse-movie category. That was what I was afraid I might have in Ella Enchanted.)

But I digress.  If you've seen the movie, you know what this book is about.  Ella is bestowed at birth from a silly fairy the gift of obedience.  The fairy is trying to help the parents- Ella won't stop crying.  So, wave the magic wand, "Stop crying," to the baby, and voila, you have an obedient child who has an inability to ignore a direct order.  What a great idea... "Clean your room," "Be happy," "Enjoy the taste," "Cut off your own head."  The premise is simple- looks like a great idea but at least is dreary for Ella, who has to actually follow all these orders, and at worst can actually endanger her and everyone around her.  So, Ella dreams of breaking the curse and it looks like that could happen when Prince Char (yes, I know) seems to have fallen in love with her... but of course we have to add evil stepsisters who figure out her secret and order her away from all happiness and generally into slavery to themselves.  You know, sweeping out the fireplace and such.  

The references to Cinderella are unavoidable, of course, but they are the most minor theme of the book.  At first glance it looks like it's just going to be a retelling of the Cinderella tale, but this book is so much more than that.  You know all along, of course, how it's going to end- break the curse, fall in love, blah, blah, blah, the last words of this book are actually "happily ever after."  (FYI, I refuse to call that a spoiler.  If you have ever heard a fairy tale telling and you don't know before opening the book that the girl is going to get the prince in the end, well... I'm not sure why you're reading at all.)  But the way this story is told is extremely enjoyable.  It's very fast-paced- I actually had a hard time putting it down and many a massage client waited an extra minute or two for me to get into the room this week- and it is written for today's audience.  Of course it's set in medieval times, but the language is neither pretentious or fake- Ella has a lovely sarcastic streak and all the characters are very relatable.  There's even a fairy that throws silent temper tantrums when she's not getting her way.  This is a book that, even though you know the ending, takes you for a really fun ride the entire way there.

Even if you didn't enjoy the movie, I really recommend this book.  It infinitely outweighs Hollywood's version.  Over 50% of the plot of the book was removed from the movie.  There are quests, giants, ogres, woodland creatures, etc, etc- don't worry, nobody sings... well, not woodland creatures, anyway- that make this story really fun.  It's not a caricature of a fairy tale- it's just a great book that reminds you of something you might have heard a long time ago, in a bedtime story, about a land far, far away...