After I blogged recently about Adele Geras' Apricots at Midnight, she very kindly sent me another of her books, Happy Ever After. I'm so glad she did, as I've had a really enjoyable time reading it. While Apricots is aimed at younger readers, this one is intended for what we call these days 'young adults'.
One important pre-requisite for a writer is having really good ideas, and Adele seems to have this in abundance. Happy Ever After is a collection of three stories, each of which could be read separately, but they are linked in two ways, by characters and by theme. The three stories all concern the same three girls, Megan, Alice and Bella, but each story is narrated by a different girl, whose story it is. Not only this, but also each of the three stories, though set in the mid-20th-century, is based on a traditional fairy tale. So Megan's story is an update of Rapunzel, Alice's of Sleeping Beauty, and Bella's of Snow White. But this is so cleverly done that it never seems crude or intrusive. So, in Megan's story, the three girls are at boarding school and sharing a room at the top of a tower. The school is also Megan's home, as she is an orphan and has been adopted by the (slightly witch-like) schoolteacher Dorothy. A young man, Simon, comes to work at the school, falls in love with Megan, and climbs up to her room via scaffolding which has been put up against the wall. But Dorothy has also fallen for Simon, and when she discovers the relationship she drives him away in a fury. Megan runs away to join him, but ends up lonely in another tower-like room in London while Simon works every day. She cuts off her long golden hair and eventually, unhappily, returns to school while Simon, hurt, goes off to America, possibly forever. Beautiful, delicate Alice lives in a grand mansion surrounded by a glorious rose garden. She has a number of eccentric aunts and great aunts, who have all given her very special presents at her christening. But her unpleasant great-aunt Violette arrives from Paris and, furious at not having been invited, wishes ill on her, to befall on her 18th birthday. And sure enough, at her birthday ball, she suffers a horrendous attack and takes to her bed, refusing to speak or move, much to the distress of her parents. Bella, whose mother has died when she was a baby, has a bad relationship with her stepmother. She leaves home during the summer holidays and moves into a house in London inhabited by the seven members of a band, whose singer she becomes. Several curious and worrying incidents occur which endanger her life, and she suspects her stepmother may in some way be responsible though she can't prove it. Of course this book is called Happy Ever After, so you may guess that these girls' stories will turn out alright in the end. They are such fun to read! As they stand up perfectly well in their own right, but have a huge added charm in that you keep recognising elements which link up with the original fairy tales, often used with great ingenuity and wit.