Spoilers ahead:
'The Pumpkin Princess and the Forever Night'
I should have adored this.
By the wonder of its title and premise.
And I really liked it at first. 'The Pumpkin Princess' is a well written, addictive and funny children's book, and it encompasses and loves all things Halloween. So rich, creative, cosy and spooky. For the most part, it reaches its potential.
It is like 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' meets 'Halloweentown' meets 'Skulduggery Pleasant'.
The plot is that a big supernatural, overlord-type being, the pumpkin-headed Pumpkin King, finds and adopts an orphan girl, nameless to the reader until she is renamed Eve by the Pumpkin King on the spot, as she is escaping her orphanage for about the fourth time, and he takes her to his Halloween realm of Hallowell Valley, to his farm of servant scarecrows, pumpkins, trees and other produce.
Young Eve is suddenly the Pumpkin Princess, and the Pumpkin King her father.
As happy as she is to have finally left the dreaded orphanage behind her, where she was always alone, she'll have to get used to living in an entirely new world of the undead; trolls, vampires, werewolves, witches, skeletons, mummies, ghosts, stone gargoyles, banshees, candle-waxy sootlings, the lot. They come out at night and sleep during the day.
Eve is the only living to ever set foot in Hallowell Valley, and she will need to prove herself to the locals to avoid banishment by prejudiced vampire aristocrats and other monsters for being different - and to avoid being eaten, whichever comes first.
In a lot of ways, 'The Pumpkin Princess' is the perfect cosy fantasy read for all ages. We follow Eve as she learns about and takes part in farming, and harvest festivals, and sees the rest of Hallowell Valley, but mainly the village of Hallowell Station. I love that she loves books and reading - the local bookshop is her favourite haunt (pun intended).
This Pumpkin Princess isn't fearless - she merely refuses to show or feel any fear. She's been suppressing so much, and she clearly has anxiety and abandonment issues from growing up in the orphanage. She used to have nigh terrors, which she'd been made to be ashamed of, and to believe they are the reason she is "broken" and thus unadoptable. So she forced the terrors to be gone one day in an unhealthy mental and emotional exertion. This "fearlessness" sometimes leads to recklessness, that can be mistaken for bravery.
Eve spent her childhood carrying the lowest self-esteem, leading to possessing the lowest self-confidence and self-preservation skills, and the fear of rejection for being "broken", and of not belonging anywhere, in a real home. So she doesn't know how to process having a family; a family that is present and loves her unconditionally, much less think of the Pumpkin King as her dad. But she'll do whatever it takes to stay in Hallowell Valley.
It's good, character-building stuff, with helpful and important lessons about fear for children to take away from. I especially love this line, 'Eve could feel the fear in her bones even now, just as she had as a child. It was constant, unable to be chased away, like a monster had taken up residence in her stomach, then built a vacation home in her brain.' (page 255) (Scariest thing in the book is how well that describes my own anxiety.)
Like I said as well: 'The Pumpkin Princess' loves Halloween. It is Halloween. With that and its complex female protagonist - with a grumpy, grunting, grumbling pumpkin-headed man with a heart of gold for a dad - it should have been the Halloween book for me. I want to live in a world like Hallowell Valley! And read all the books I want!
Sadly, like pretty much every disappointing read for me, now that I think about it, the actual disappointment begins near the ending of the book, where it all goes downhill (down the pumpkin patch hill... I'll shut up now). Because it is rushed (the "twist villain" reveal and the subsequent climax and resolution all happen less than forty pages from the end), and because - now I shall disclose the big spoilers, as it pertains to emphasising my point - we have yet another case in modern media, in 2024, where the witches are the villains. Where old witches, old crones, are the villains. Where entire covens are villainised, and end up ostracised at the end, and this is seen as a victory.
It isn't until over halfway into 'The Pumpkin Princess' that the real plot begins. Where urgency, a mystery, unfolds (unless you count Eve accusing werewolves of conspiring to overthrow the Pumpkin King, and no one listening to her, which turns out to be for the best as it is a red herring and misunderstanding on her part), and an evil plan is revealed, to rule over Hallowell Valley by literally chaining the moon and making the sun never rise again. This resolves itself the next night, and it happens again very briefly at the rushed climax. The 'Forever Night' in the novel's title is barely present, or even relevant.
Big surprise, it's a spell by a coven of witches, lead by Mother Morrigan, a councillor who was previously presented as nothing but grandmotherly to Eve, soft and flustered, concerned and worried for the child and for the Valley. As soon as her treachery is unveiled, she morphs into a different character - a conniving, bloodthirsty, cackling caricature. Mother Morrigan refuses to let witches progress and be modern, like the younger generation wants, and wants to go back to the old ways of evil witches forming covens, and being feared and powerful and dominating over everything.
Sweet Lilith and Hecate, it's like 'Rewitched' all over again!
Way to reinforce the stereotype of witch elders being evil spawns (and slaves, or whores, whatever historical context/ pious propaganda you want to apply) of Satan, too. Speaking of real life history, elderly "witches" were never evil; they were simply women who were midwives, medicinal healers, pagans attuned to nature and such, who were dehumanised, prosecuted and executed by rising patriarchal religious groups who feared and hated them.
Covens of women are, and always have been, about community, protection, love and never harming anyone. But 'The Pumpkin Princess', in a predictable and trite "twist", says screw that, covens of witches are actually outdated, ancient and stuffy, and they are filled with old, ugly, cackling, evil women who refuse change, so the very concept of covens, of women getting together to share things like stories and ways to help people, should be banned; they should be disbanded. Now that's progress!
All this is to say: Authors, stop vilifying witches (who are not scary, undead monsters, but human beings), and older witches at that, please. Stop vilifying older women. Stop vilifying women in positions of power and authority, period.
Women are not monsters. Bugger off.
To add insult to injury, it turns out that the initial antagonist of 'The Pumpkin Princess', Baroness La'Ment, a vampire aristocrat, tyrant and councillor who has had it in for Eve since her first appearance and is Eve's main bigoted obstacle, along with her spoiled teenage twin daughters, is indeed as evil as Mother Morrigan. They are working together to enact the forever night for self-serving reasons, and for the Baroness to drain Eve of her blood. Of course. You can't have enough bad, scary, power-hungry, bloodthirsty (sometimes literally), strongminded, capable and wealthy women in fiction, right?!
Women who are anywhere close to being described as "ruthless" are monsters to be slain, but in men, this is seen as normal, acceptable and expected!
To be fair, not all older women in 'The Pumpkin Princess' are tyrannical dictators. There's Seline the witch bookshop owner, Ellie the skeleton seamstress, Celia Shroud the ghost author (ghostwriter, heh, clever), the doctor On'Jure, and her assistant Annabelle. However, these are minor, unassuming characters. And there are no male antagonists, as far from saints as a few of them are. They are no threat to Eve or the Hallowell Valley society. Unlike the women in positions of power and authority.
*sigh*
There's one female werewolf mentioned - only one, and she's nameless.
*sigh*
Other flaws include:
While it is part of her character flaw she needs to work on, Eve's recklessness and imperviousness to risks and danger make her a terrible, pushy friend. In Hallowell Station, she befriends Vlad, a tubby vampire boy who longs for a more substantial diet than just blood on its own (he'll be a great chef, I'm sure, admittedly thanks to Eve finding a vampiric cookbook for him in the bookshop), and he's an inventor. Vlad is also Baroness La'Ment's nephew whom she and her daughters abuse (he is the only living (in a manner of speaking) male in his family, abused by all the females, *sigh*). Eve's other friend, to complete the children's fantasy book trio, is Lyla, Seline's daughter and a clumsy witch, who could potentially be a serial killer by the way she talks and acts like a sociopath (BTW, Mother Morrigan is her "greatest-grandmother", and she and her mother have no reaction to the overall impact of her treachery, and the "old-fashioned" covens disbanding).
Anyway, Eve pushes Vlad and Lyla into dangerous situations, often by coercing, guilt-tripping and scaring them. She's never properly called out for this, nor does she properly apologise to her friends for nearly getting them killed more than once without a thought.
Eve learns nothing from her mistakes regarding endangering the first friends she's had in her life, as she goes right back to pushing them into mad and deadly situations towards the book's climax.
Eve is not always thoughtless and inconsiderate. At one point, she sneaks out of the Pumpkin King's farm to embark on a dangerous operation with Vlad and Lyla, which she knows will upset a scarecrow servant, who she named Scrags, if he discovers her missing. She thinks to make it up to him later. But then this is never brought up again.
The Pumpkin Princess is not the only bad friend, though. Throughout all of Lyla's inept spellcasting and unfiltered dialogue, to me her worst moment is near the end, where her apparently sentient broom is overburdened by too much weight - the weight of the heroic child trio and Vlad's destructive gadgets - and is left exhausted, and the little stick understandably rolls away from Lyla. Her reaction? She calls it "rude", and has the gall to be "offended". In the final pages, specifically page 314, it's mentioned that Lyla's broom "was thankfully starting to forgive her." No elaboration. That's it.
I can't believe a book has made me feel sorry for a broom that no one in the book itself cares about.
Eve helps to bring Christmas to Hallowell Valley. I find it hard to believe that none of the undead residents, not even the Pumpkin King, who is older than the Valley's existence and has been to the living world loads of times, have never heard of Christmas. It's explained once that many of the undead came from the living world when they were alive; how do they not know of Christmas? Do their memories of being alive fade? Did even the Pumpkin King think that Halloween was the only holiday that exists in the land of the living?
The Pumpkin King is the oldest resident of Hallowell Valley. Older than the concept of time itself, presumably. So why has he only now, at this All Hallows Eve (hence Eve's new name), decided to adopt and bring back home a living person? A child? Apparently Eve is the only living to ever exist in Hallowell Valley. Is she really that special? Why does he think he needs an heir? Or is he just lonely? He was totally unprepared for fatherhood, so I don't know. What exactly is the Pumpkin King's motivation to make a living child his Pumpkin Princess?
How are the witches, and other "monsters", considered undead? It is said they are, in fact, alive, though not by much. They are half-dead? All the undead can apparently breed, too. How long do they live, or, er, exist? Are they immortal? Unless they are killed - like, made dead-dead - by force, or their respective weaknesses? How do they age? How do the undead work in this world? It's vague and unclear.
One vital part of the Halloween aesthetic is missing: where are the Frankenstein's monsters and mad scientists in this world? Seems like a wasted opportunity to me.
Well, that's it. My review of 'The Pumpkin Princess and the Forever Night', yet another fantasy book of 2024 I should have loved. That is witchy and just right and ripe for the Halloween season.
Despite its flaws, I would recommend it, if, unlike me, you can overlook its worldbuilding holes, plot holes, and unfortunate implications in its villain reveals. Maybe I am an overly nitpicky adult? It is nowhere near as crushingly, jaw-droppingly disappointing as 'Rewitched', and it is one of the better children's books I've read recently. On the cover, New York Times bestselling author Chuck Wendig called it "Spooky and sweet.", and that's a fitting descriptor.
It is on the whole a charming, cosy read. But I'm sorry, I can't discount its problematic elements.
That's my opinion.
Thus concludes Artemis Crescent's final Halloween book review of 2024.
Happy (late) Halloween, everyone.
Final Score: 3/5
I should have adored this.
By the wonder of its title and premise.
And I really liked it at first. 'The Pumpkin Princess' is a well written, addictive and funny children's book, and it encompasses and loves all things Halloween. So rich, creative, cosy and spooky. For the most part, it reaches its potential.
It is like 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' meets 'Halloweentown' meets 'Skulduggery Pleasant'.
The plot is that a big supernatural, overlord-type being, the pumpkin-headed Pumpkin King, finds and adopts an orphan girl, nameless to the reader until she is renamed Eve by the Pumpkin King on the spot, as she is escaping her orphanage for about the fourth time, and he takes her to his Halloween realm of Hallowell Valley, to his farm of servant scarecrows, pumpkins, trees and other produce.
Young Eve is suddenly the Pumpkin Princess, and the Pumpkin King her father.
As happy as she is to have finally left the dreaded orphanage behind her, where she was always alone, she'll have to get used to living in an entirely new world of the undead; trolls, vampires, werewolves, witches, skeletons, mummies, ghosts, stone gargoyles, banshees, candle-waxy sootlings, the lot. They come out at night and sleep during the day.
Eve is the only living to ever set foot in Hallowell Valley, and she will need to prove herself to the locals to avoid banishment by prejudiced vampire aristocrats and other monsters for being different - and to avoid being eaten, whichever comes first.
In a lot of ways, 'The Pumpkin Princess' is the perfect cosy fantasy read for all ages. We follow Eve as she learns about and takes part in farming, and harvest festivals, and sees the rest of Hallowell Valley, but mainly the village of Hallowell Station. I love that she loves books and reading - the local bookshop is her favourite haunt (pun intended).
This Pumpkin Princess isn't fearless - she merely refuses to show or feel any fear. She's been suppressing so much, and she clearly has anxiety and abandonment issues from growing up in the orphanage. She used to have nigh terrors, which she'd been made to be ashamed of, and to believe they are the reason she is "broken" and thus unadoptable. So she forced the terrors to be gone one day in an unhealthy mental and emotional exertion. This "fearlessness" sometimes leads to recklessness, that can be mistaken for bravery.
Eve spent her childhood carrying the lowest self-esteem, leading to possessing the lowest self-confidence and self-preservation skills, and the fear of rejection for being "broken", and of not belonging anywhere, in a real home. So she doesn't know how to process having a family; a family that is present and loves her unconditionally, much less think of the Pumpkin King as her dad. But she'll do whatever it takes to stay in Hallowell Valley.
It's good, character-building stuff, with helpful and important lessons about fear for children to take away from. I especially love this line, 'Eve could feel the fear in her bones even now, just as she had as a child. It was constant, unable to be chased away, like a monster had taken up residence in her stomach, then built a vacation home in her brain.' (page 255) (Scariest thing in the book is how well that describes my own anxiety.)
Like I said as well: 'The Pumpkin Princess' loves Halloween. It is Halloween. With that and its complex female protagonist - with a grumpy, grunting, grumbling pumpkin-headed man with a heart of gold for a dad - it should have been the Halloween book for me. I want to live in a world like Hallowell Valley! And read all the books I want!
Sadly, like pretty much every disappointing read for me, now that I think about it, the actual disappointment begins near the ending of the book, where it all goes downhill (down the pumpkin patch hill... I'll shut up now). Because it is rushed (the "twist villain" reveal and the subsequent climax and resolution all happen less than forty pages from the end), and because - now I shall disclose the big spoilers, as it pertains to emphasising my point - we have yet another case in modern media, in 2024, where the witches are the villains. Where old witches, old crones, are the villains. Where entire covens are villainised, and end up ostracised at the end, and this is seen as a victory.
It isn't until over halfway into 'The Pumpkin Princess' that the real plot begins. Where urgency, a mystery, unfolds (unless you count Eve accusing werewolves of conspiring to overthrow the Pumpkin King, and no one listening to her, which turns out to be for the best as it is a red herring and misunderstanding on her part), and an evil plan is revealed, to rule over Hallowell Valley by literally chaining the moon and making the sun never rise again. This resolves itself the next night, and it happens again very briefly at the rushed climax. The 'Forever Night' in the novel's title is barely present, or even relevant.
Big surprise, it's a spell by a coven of witches, lead by Mother Morrigan, a councillor who was previously presented as nothing but grandmotherly to Eve, soft and flustered, concerned and worried for the child and for the Valley. As soon as her treachery is unveiled, she morphs into a different character - a conniving, bloodthirsty, cackling caricature. Mother Morrigan refuses to let witches progress and be modern, like the younger generation wants, and wants to go back to the old ways of evil witches forming covens, and being feared and powerful and dominating over everything.
Sweet Lilith and Hecate, it's like 'Rewitched' all over again!
Way to reinforce the stereotype of witch elders being evil spawns (and slaves, or whores, whatever historical context/ pious propaganda you want to apply) of Satan, too. Speaking of real life history, elderly "witches" were never evil; they were simply women who were midwives, medicinal healers, pagans attuned to nature and such, who were dehumanised, prosecuted and executed by rising patriarchal religious groups who feared and hated them.
Covens of women are, and always have been, about community, protection, love and never harming anyone. But 'The Pumpkin Princess', in a predictable and trite "twist", says screw that, covens of witches are actually outdated, ancient and stuffy, and they are filled with old, ugly, cackling, evil women who refuse change, so the very concept of covens, of women getting together to share things like stories and ways to help people, should be banned; they should be disbanded. Now that's progress!
All this is to say: Authors, stop vilifying witches (who are not scary, undead monsters, but human beings), and older witches at that, please. Stop vilifying older women. Stop vilifying women in positions of power and authority, period.
Women are not monsters. Bugger off.
To add insult to injury, it turns out that the initial antagonist of 'The Pumpkin Princess', Baroness La'Ment, a vampire aristocrat, tyrant and councillor who has had it in for Eve since her first appearance and is Eve's main bigoted obstacle, along with her spoiled teenage twin daughters, is indeed as evil as Mother Morrigan. They are working together to enact the forever night for self-serving reasons, and for the Baroness to drain Eve of her blood. Of course. You can't have enough bad, scary, power-hungry, bloodthirsty (sometimes literally), strongminded, capable and wealthy women in fiction, right?!
Women who are anywhere close to being described as "ruthless" are monsters to be slain, but in men, this is seen as normal, acceptable and expected!
To be fair, not all older women in 'The Pumpkin Princess' are tyrannical dictators. There's Seline the witch bookshop owner, Ellie the skeleton seamstress, Celia Shroud the ghost author (ghostwriter, heh, clever), the doctor On'Jure, and her assistant Annabelle. However, these are minor, unassuming characters. And there are no male antagonists, as far from saints as a few of them are. They are no threat to Eve or the Hallowell Valley society. Unlike the women in positions of power and authority.
*sigh*
There's one female werewolf mentioned - only one, and she's nameless.
*sigh*
Other flaws include:
While it is part of her character flaw she needs to work on, Eve's recklessness and imperviousness to risks and danger make her a terrible, pushy friend. In Hallowell Station, she befriends Vlad, a tubby vampire boy who longs for a more substantial diet than just blood on its own (he'll be a great chef, I'm sure, admittedly thanks to Eve finding a vampiric cookbook for him in the bookshop), and he's an inventor. Vlad is also Baroness La'Ment's nephew whom she and her daughters abuse (he is the only living (in a manner of speaking) male in his family, abused by all the females, *sigh*). Eve's other friend, to complete the children's fantasy book trio, is Lyla, Seline's daughter and a clumsy witch, who could potentially be a serial killer by the way she talks and acts like a sociopath (BTW, Mother Morrigan is her "greatest-grandmother", and she and her mother have no reaction to the overall impact of her treachery, and the "old-fashioned" covens disbanding).
Anyway, Eve pushes Vlad and Lyla into dangerous situations, often by coercing, guilt-tripping and scaring them. She's never properly called out for this, nor does she properly apologise to her friends for nearly getting them killed more than once without a thought.
Eve learns nothing from her mistakes regarding endangering the first friends she's had in her life, as she goes right back to pushing them into mad and deadly situations towards the book's climax.
Eve is not always thoughtless and inconsiderate. At one point, she sneaks out of the Pumpkin King's farm to embark on a dangerous operation with Vlad and Lyla, which she knows will upset a scarecrow servant, who she named Scrags, if he discovers her missing. She thinks to make it up to him later. But then this is never brought up again.
The Pumpkin Princess is not the only bad friend, though. Throughout all of Lyla's inept spellcasting and unfiltered dialogue, to me her worst moment is near the end, where her apparently sentient broom is overburdened by too much weight - the weight of the heroic child trio and Vlad's destructive gadgets - and is left exhausted, and the little stick understandably rolls away from Lyla. Her reaction? She calls it "rude", and has the gall to be "offended". In the final pages, specifically page 314, it's mentioned that Lyla's broom "was thankfully starting to forgive her." No elaboration. That's it.
I can't believe a book has made me feel sorry for a broom that no one in the book itself cares about.
Eve helps to bring Christmas to Hallowell Valley. I find it hard to believe that none of the undead residents, not even the Pumpkin King, who is older than the Valley's existence and has been to the living world loads of times, have never heard of Christmas. It's explained once that many of the undead came from the living world when they were alive; how do they not know of Christmas? Do their memories of being alive fade? Did even the Pumpkin King think that Halloween was the only holiday that exists in the land of the living?
The Pumpkin King is the oldest resident of Hallowell Valley. Older than the concept of time itself, presumably. So why has he only now, at this All Hallows Eve (hence Eve's new name), decided to adopt and bring back home a living person? A child? Apparently Eve is the only living to ever exist in Hallowell Valley. Is she really that special? Why does he think he needs an heir? Or is he just lonely? He was totally unprepared for fatherhood, so I don't know. What exactly is the Pumpkin King's motivation to make a living child his Pumpkin Princess?
How are the witches, and other "monsters", considered undead? It is said they are, in fact, alive, though not by much. They are half-dead? All the undead can apparently breed, too. How long do they live, or, er, exist? Are they immortal? Unless they are killed - like, made dead-dead - by force, or their respective weaknesses? How do they age? How do the undead work in this world? It's vague and unclear.
One vital part of the Halloween aesthetic is missing: where are the Frankenstein's monsters and mad scientists in this world? Seems like a wasted opportunity to me.
Well, that's it. My review of 'The Pumpkin Princess and the Forever Night', yet another fantasy book of 2024 I should have loved. That is witchy and just right and ripe for the Halloween season.
Despite its flaws, I would recommend it, if, unlike me, you can overlook its worldbuilding holes, plot holes, and unfortunate implications in its villain reveals. Maybe I am an overly nitpicky adult? It is nowhere near as crushingly, jaw-droppingly disappointing as 'Rewitched', and it is one of the better children's books I've read recently. On the cover, New York Times bestselling author Chuck Wendig called it "Spooky and sweet.", and that's a fitting descriptor.
It is on the whole a charming, cosy read. But I'm sorry, I can't discount its problematic elements.
That's my opinion.
Thus concludes Artemis Crescent's final Halloween book review of 2024.
Happy (late) Halloween, everyone.
Final Score: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment