I was soooo excited to read this book when I saw it on display at my local Books A Million. The cover art is beautiful and drew me in instantly. I bought it and started reading it a few days later. The delay being related to work but anyways back to the review! Another reason that I chose this book is because I love Aurora’s story! She is in my top five of my favorite Disney princesses.

So, the story opens up with Prince Phillip’s point of view before he “kills” Maleificent. Braswell presents the price as being kind of shell shocked, which I would have been too, after killing the dark fairy while heading inside the palace to lift the spell. However, the poor prince falls pray to the spell – kind of like lingering radiation- and collapses at the foot of Aurora’s bed before even breaking the curse. That is when we are introduced to Aurora’s dream world and this is where I started to feel like as a writer she was loosing me. The twisted part of this fairy tale is that in Aurora’s dream world Maleificent is a good fairy that has saved the people that were in the palace the day in the real world was Aurora’s debut by creating a barrier out of the black thorns (used in the movie) from the destroyed world created by Aurora’s dream world parents.
This all seems like a great tale right? Well, it was not for me! It was like the author took the script for Sleeping Beauty plopped it in the book and wrote short chapters on the twisted part. I realize that yes it was going to mostly like the original script but could we have had a dash more originality? Also, I just couldn’t get past the writing style of Braswell and that the voice she was giving to Aurora in this version did not fit Aurora to me. She did try to make it funny but in all honesty the voice reminded me a lot of whining Bella from books 2-4 of the twilight series. Maleificent’s was truly the best voice in the book and besides the cover that is truly what gave this rating a one out of four stars.  I had such high hopes for this story because it was written by a Disney writer and it didn’t meet my expectations!