A Kiss in Time -- Alex Flinn

Sorry about the lack of cover art -- I couldn't find it online.  Grrr.  Picture a pretty green-eyed blonde girl in a tasteful tiara and a satiny green dress looking at someone off camera.

For as far back as she can remember, Talia, Princess of Euphrasia, has been warned away from spindles.  Well, not even away from, as her father has banned them from the kingdom.  But she gets warned about them on an hourly basis anyway. 

She must avoid them at all costs, for an angry witch cursed her at her christening and... I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this part of the story.  She's tired of never having any control over her life, she's bossy and pretty spoiled (she might not be able to do whatever she wants, but she does get whatever she wants).  On the day of her sixteenth birthday, one thing leads to another and the curse comes true:  She pricks her finger on a spindle and falls asleep, as does everyone else in the kingdom.

Three hundred years later, like, now:  Jack O'Neill has been dumped by his girlfriend and shipped off for a European tour by his very hands-off parents.  He is bored bored bored bored bored, so he and his friend Travis slip away from the tour for the day, get lost on their way to the beach, and find themselves confronted with a giant thorny hedge.  Obviously, they need to find out what's on the other side...

I enjoyed this one.  It was a real departure from the other Alex Flinn books I've read (Breathing Underwater (still my favorite, hands down*), Breaking Point and Nothing to Lose), but somehow I missed three along the way, so maybe she's been doing this fairy tale thing for a while now.  I shall do some checking.  Hmmm, yes:  I see that her most recent book (before this one) was Beastly, so maybe.  I'll look it up.  Yep.  Looks like it's her take on Beauty and the Beast.  Huh.  I'll have to track that one down.  But before that was Diva, which was a follow-up of sorts to Breathing Underwater, and Fade to Black, which dealt with bullying and sounds like it deals with some of the same themes as her second two books.  So apparently I'm not totally behind on this fairy tale thing.  Phew.

ANYWAY.  None of that was really necessary.  Sorry, I'm feeling somewhat tangent-y today.

Like I said, I enjoyed it.  I never really fell in love with or got attached to the characters, but I enjoyed being a witness to their respective transformations and I was interested to see where the story would take them (and me), so it kept my interest.  It was a neat spin on Sleeping Beauty, and I especially enjoyed experiencing our time and world through the filter of Talia's perspective.  And I thought it was a kick that the original story didn't seem to exist in their world -- which would make sense, of course, as it hadn't quite happened yet.  Overall, though, of the two Sleeping Beauty re-writes I've read recently, I enjoyed Beauty Sleep much more.  But Melissa Marr loved it, so there you go.

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*Which, by the way, there was some trouble about recently.