Story for the Week
Every little girl I know has a favorite Disney princess or has had multiple favorites over the years. When my daughter was two, she was Snow White for Halloween. Another year, she was Pocahontas, and yet another, she was Merida from Brave. Corinne has the hair for that one. No wig required. We just had to buy the colored hairspray to go with the costume.😉
I also am guilty of gobbling up Disney princess movies right along with my daughter. We have regularly seen them at the theater followed by pre-ordering the DVD and collecting the lithographs. While Corinne may have outgrown the Disney Store, neither of us has outgrown the movies. Just the other day, we watched the live-action Cinderella. I’ve watched many of them too many times to count, and I can say with total confidence that Tangled remains one of my all-time favorites.
You can always count on Disney for a happily-ever-after ending. Disney is the happiest place on earth, after all. But many of the fairy tales that became Disney movies have some superbly dark undertones.
In the Disney version of Snow White, the Evil Queen falls over a cliff to her death after being chased away by the dwarves. In the original version written by the Brothers Grimm, she sneaks into Snow White’s wedding to the prince, and she is put into iron, red-hot shoes and forced to dance until she drops dead. In the Grimm version of Cinderella, the stepsisters chop off parts of their feet (one the toes and one the heels) in order to fit the glass slipper. During her wedding, Cinderella summons doves to peck out her stepsisters’ eyes as punishment.
Twisted, to say the least.
Not all fairy tales become Disney movies with princesses. I remember vividly the story of Rumpelstiltskin, an impish creature who helps a young girl spin straw into gold for the king who eventually promises to marry her after she spins all the straw into gold. The imp helps her twice in exchange for jewelry, but on the third day, he wants her first-born child because she has nothing left to offer. After she marries the king and gives birth to her first child, the imp returns to collect. She offers him riches and wealth, but he declines and says that he will only let her out of the deal if she can guess his name within three days. The queen outsmarts the imp because she overhears him singing in the woods.
Rumpelstiltskin flies into a rage, and there are several variations of what happens to him, but suffice it to say, he didn’t just walk away. I just finished a book that reminded me a lot of the story of Rumpelstiltskin. It was a promising premise, and while I wasn’t crazy about it, there are others who enjoyed it a lot more than I did.
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for Tell Me My Name by Erin Ruddy
344 pages
Publisher: Dundern Press
Publication Date: Oct0ber 27, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Dundern Press in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
Ellie and Neil Patterson are eager to enjoy some quality time at their new cottage. It’s the first time in 10 years they’ve been alone…or are they?
When a friendly encounter leads to their violent kidnapping, they awaken to a living nightmare. Insisting he is Ellie’s soulmate, the stranger gives her three chances to say his name. If she guesses wrong, it’s Neil who will suffer the consequences. This propels Ellie into a desperate trip down memory lane to dredge up the dubious men of her past.
Only after discovering the man’s true identity and sacrificing her own safety to save Neil does Ellie finally learn the truth—that everything she thinks she knows about her husband and their decade-long love story is a lie.
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I really wanted to like Erin Ruddy’s debut novel Tell Me My Name. The description grabbed me. How many times have you encountered someone from your distant past and their name is on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t place them? Now imagine that person is an obsessive admirer who expects you to remember, even though he’s changed his appearance, and your punishment for not remembering is the torture and killing of your spouse. All he wants (or at least all he says he wants) is for you to tell him his name. It’s really a horrific version of the Grimm Brothers’ Rumpelstiltskin.
Sounded intriguing. And I was really looking forward to reading it. But those of you who know the tale of Rumpelstiltskin know that it ends when the girl correctly guesses his name. While I didn’t expect this story to conclude the same way, I didn’t expect our protagonist Ellie to guess her captor’s name only 30% of the way through the book. What comes after is a convoluted and sometimes hard to believe mess of police investigation and familial interference in that investigation.
There were plot lines that were over the top (see spoilers below), and I will echo the other reviewer comments that the lead detective’s habit of saying “toodle-loo” was just plain odd. I also really didn’t like the author’s writing style. There were times that it felt like she was trying to use every 25-cent word she could come up with, but all it did was make the writing sound awkward.
There was also way too much back and forth between characters and between past and present. At times, we’d get a handful of paragraphs from one point of view and then it would switch. It felt like the scene changes in a movie or a TV show, but those were much too quick for a novel. There needed to be more of a buildup.
Now for the plot lines that didn’t work.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
Ellie’s husband Neil had a toe and a finger cut off, broke his way out of a chair he was tied to, and jumped from the second story of a burning building but had the ability to escape the hospital to go in search of his wife. He commandeered the help of his brother-in-law who got his face smashed with a meat tenderizer. After they were both taken to the hospital and Neil is even weaker and being treated for a raging infection, he escaped again, “borrowed” his sister-in-law’s car to drive a couple hours away again in search of Ellie.
Authors use this plot line all the time, where a family member just doesn’t want to listen to the police and thinks they can do a better job of finding their loved one. But at what point are we to believe that Neil was superhuman and really able to function if he was in such bad shape? And the detective’s consistent empathy for him and not having someone keep an eye on him because he’s made this a habit was just ludicrous.
There were also too many escapes and near escapes. And just when you think the story is coming to an end when Ellie gets rescued, you realize that you have 15% of the story to go when Part 3 starts 10 months later. It’s then we learn that Ellie’s kidnapper Clive wasn’t dead when we thought he was dead, so we had to go through him coming back for Ellie, and Neil once again thought that he could do better than the police in rescuing her.
Finally, I thought it was a little ridiculous to make Neil the person who caused the accident that killed Ellie’s sister when they were teenagers. And Clive just happened to witness the accident back then and then just happened to know that Neil got off and then just happened to become a bartender where Ellie used to frequent when she was in her 20s.
Make him a stalker, make him actively seek her out, but the coincidences were too much for me. The story line with Neil and the sister was irrelevant. Clive could have just been jealous that Neil ended up with Ellie since he’s obsessively in love with her.
This book had a lot of potential, but it really didn’t live up to it.
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