Christopher Healy is the author of The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, as well as its two sequels, The Hero's Guide to Storming the Castle and The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw. Before becoming a writer, he worked as an actor, an ad copywriter, a toy store display designer, a fact-checker, a dishwasher, a journalist, a costume shop clothing stitcher, a children's entertainment reviewer, and a haunted house zombie. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two children, and a dog named Duncan. You can visit him online at christopherhealy.com.
"One of the more clever, hilariously successful incarnations of the current literary rage to rip apart and rewrite fairy tales... The princes in "The Hero's Guide" may not be charming, but Healy's romp of a book about them most certainly is." -- Los Angeles Times"The premise is indeed charming...a quest that recalls at moments the Musketeers and at others, the Marxes." -- New York Times Book Review"Healy's fast-paced debut is overflowing with suspense, humor, and carefully developed characters. Healy injects age-old characters and fairy tale tropes with a fresh, contemporary sensibility, resulting in a crowd-pleaser with laugh-out-loud lines on nearly every page." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"The fairy-tale world is tongue-in-cheek but fleshed out, creating its own humor rather than relying on pop-culture references. Healy juggles with pitch-perfect accuracy, rendering the princes as goobers with good hearts and individual strengths, keeping them distinct and believable. Inventive and hilarious." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"[A] lively, humorous adventure." -- Wall Street Journal"This is the most fun you can have short of rounding up King Arthur's knights, filling their armor with laughing gas, and driving them to a roller disco." -- Frank Cottrell Boyce, New York Times bestselling author of COSMIC
Gr 4-6-The premise in this debut novel is that the princes in the "Cinderella," "Snow White," "Rapunzel," and "Sleeping Beauty" stories resent their relative anonymity (they're all just known as "Prince Charming") and want some recognition. Then, too, that "happily ever after" thing isn't working for any of them, so the princes and their princesses set off to rectify matters. The eight of them team up in assorted permutations throughout the ensuing slapstick proceedings. Unfortunately, it all becomes tiresomely repetitive. Though it might be funny once for people to fall over and knock into other people who fall over. and over and over like dominoes, it stops being amusing pretty quickly. It's understandable that Healy's characters are broadly drawn. They are, after all, fairy-tale personae. But more than 400 pages of the obsessive-compulsive prince, the ridiculously macho prince, the overachieving prince, and the extremely stupid prince and their equally one-dimensional princesses are a lot to plow through, especially when things are left so unresolved that readers suspect a sequel is in the offing.-Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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