​I posted a couple of weeks ago with a list of my books correlated to Disney Princess movies. What I wanted to do was use these motifs to move past a general “idea” about the book's identities to examine specific themes in each story. Comparison to these movies is not a final definition for my books. Rather it is a start towards eliminating vagueness about each book's personality. Since these are children's movies, and childhood comes first in life, perhaps it makes sense to begin by examining the simple concepts that appear in them.

So this is a follow-up post where I’ll give a bit more detail on what I’m talking about here and why I chose each movie for each book. To keep the post from getting too long since there are 10 little summaries, I've broken it into two posts with five books for each post. (The Palladia Series has 2 books in it, so that is five in this post. It just looks like 4.)

• The Birthday Present is a set of two stories that are essential complements to each other. Since "Millhaven Castle" had more audience exposure than "Birthday Present" in the past, they appear significantly different but they still belong together. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle and the Beast are equally compelling within the story and their surface dissimilarities at first hide a really true connection.
• Facets of Fantasy is a book of episodic novellas that seem unconnected. Because they are disjointed, they consist of situations that vary a lot from wistful and pristine to comedy to slightly saddening scenes of confrontation or betrayal. All of these remind me very much of the wide diversity of storytelling elements in Tangled.
• The Palladia Series has gradually evolved from the way it originally appeared and is in continual development as it seems there’s more to discover in it. As one of the most popular and most frequently retold fairy tales of all time, Cinderella always has some new spinoff going on, beyond Disney animated sequels and a live-action update to numerous independent movies and books over the decades. That glass shoe in blue light is a pretty compelling image.
• Victoria: A Tale of Spain has a smart female protagonist in an unusual plot, and it combines creepy drama and wild comedy pretty equally. The Princess and the Frog has similar components in terms of hopping (pun intended) around a variety of scenes from swanky to frumpy and like Victoria it's a "smaller" story you might not look at first. But if you do get around to it, you could be surprised what's in it.

I'll do a similar summary for the remaining 5 books in a later post.

And there will be more updates

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If any of you have ever walked into a grocery store, a bookstore, or a sells-everything store like Walmart, you’ve seen Disney Princess merchandise. Little coloring books of Cinderella’s adventures, board books about Elsa for just a dollar, backpacks for little girls sporting a smiling image of red-haired Ariel or serene Belle. Rapunzel dolls, Snow White costume dresses, Tiana purses, and hairbrushes featuring all the princesses.

I didn’t actually grow up with these princesses, like so many women who are now my age, and I never knew much about the characters that inspired these toys. I was taken to see The Little Mermaid when it came out and I landed on brief moments of the other movies from time to time, but Disney stuff was really rare in my family because my mom disliked the whole princess thing--with a few exceptions like The Lion King and Fantasia (and a touch of Mary Poppins) because they weren’t princess movies. It was only as an adult that I saw many of the “Princess” movies in full for the first time.

I came to these movies so late that for a long time they all looked very similar. I could barely tell them apart except by the princess’s hair colors. But gradually I noticed two things: they are a broad cultural frame of reference that most people are familiar with; and they don’t necessarily have the same audience they did 10-15 years ago. As time goes on, people come and go from these movies and while the princesses always look the same, those interested in them do not. That could make them quite useful for using the Princesses and their evolution over time to place my books in the bigger picture by comparing them to something that is familiar to many of you.

So here’s a list of the movies that remind me of each book’s personality. You might not find this helpful (it depends on how much you like princesses!), but if not you can just laugh. 😊

• The Birthday Present ~ Beauty and the Beast
• Facets of Fantasy ~ Tangled
• The Palladia Series ~ Cinderella
• Victoria: A Tale of Spain ~ The Princess and the Frog
• The Test of Devotion ~ Mulan
• Bellevere House ~ Anastasia (I know, it's not technically Disney)
• A Year with the Harrisons ~ Sleeping Beauty
• Ryan and Essie ~ Pocahontas
• This Merry Summertime ~ Brave

And there will be more updates.