Name: Sleeping Beauty
ISBN: 9781607102564

Maureen McGowan

In this twist on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Princess Lucette, cursed as a baby by her evil vampire aunt, discovers as she grows older that the only way to protect herself and her kingdom is to train as a vampire slayer. The reader is given chances throughout the text to choose the direction of the plot.

Vampire Slayer

Sleeping Beauty

Daniela V.

"(...)A kiss had woken me and I’d found, as we so often do, that the world had moved on without me. And that’s the riddle of existence for you. When to move and when to stay. Dwell too long and we become the prisoner of our dreams, or someone else’s. Move too fast, live without pause, and you’ll miss it all, your whole life a blur of doing. Good lives are built of moments – of times when we step back and truly see. The dream and the dreamer. There’s the rub. Does the dream ever let go? Aren’t we all only sleepwalking into old age, just waiting, waiting, waiting for that kiss?..." 

I love the short stories that Mark Lawrence has written of his Broken Empire Trilogy. I like those little insights to the world of the Builders that are all around them.

In Sleeping Beauty, Jorg and Hakon encounter some remnants of the Builders age on their way back from a visit to the ancient city of Vyene, probably an old bunker. But there are ghosts of the past that lurk there and one of those warn Jorg and his companion of the terrible needles that they might encounter inside of the cave... but Jorg never listens.

This is the most amazing sci-fi retelling of fairy tales that I've read so far. It features a lot of reference to other fairy tales, not only "Sleeping Beauty", the most obvious one being The Snow Queen.

Mark's prose is impeccable as you might have noticed when you read the quote at the beginning of my review.

Though it can be read before the Broken Empire Trilogy, I recommend you to read it after King of Thorns because at the start of the trilogy I was very confused with all the things related to the Builders.

Sleeping Beauty Vampire Slayer

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