Book Review: The Daring Prince Dashing by Marilou T. Reeder

The Daring Prince Dashing

By Marilou T. Reeder

Publisher: Sky Pony Press

Published: Nov. 3, 2015

ISBN: 9781634501613

Amazon Synopsis:

Prince Dashing is daring and will stop at nothing to find a new friend!

Prince Dashing bathes with crocodiles, eats while dangling upside down from the tallest trees, and toasts s’mores by dragon’s breath.

The night of the royal ice cream social, he meets a girl as adventurous as he is. But at the stroke of bedtime, the girl hurries off, leaving behind her mysterious stick. In his usual daring way, Dashing ventures out to search for the stick’s owner. He gallops by groups of thugs, tromps past toothy crocodiles, and eventually stumbles into the zoo. Will he ever find his friend?

Follow Dashing and one equally daring girl in this humorous tale of fearless fun and friendship.

Book Links

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My Thoughts:

The Daring Prince Dashing is a cute rewrite of the classic fairy tale of “Cinderella” told with the main character being, of course, Prince Dashing.

Prince Dashing is fearless, to the dread of everyone in the kingdom, including his parents. Children will be delighted with the antics of this rather adventuresome prince.

As the prince is a child in this story, instead of a ball, he has an ice cream social to which all the children from near and far are invited and to the social comes a girl on a “stick-thingy” that made an intriguing zing-boing, zing-boing noise that catches his attention. Then he sees her walk on a tight-rope while eating her sundae and likes her instantly. Unfortunately she runs off at the stroke of bedtime and leaves her stick-thingy behind.

Being the adventurous sort, Prince Dashing vows that the girl who could make the right sound with the stick-thingy would be his special guest at his birthday party, and he would search the land for her – blindfolded!

He searches high and low for the girl he calls Stickerella, but none can make the correct sound with the stick. Finally, the girl reads a notice about her missing stick-thingy and goes to claim it back. The prince invites her to his birthday party and of course, a new friendship is born.

This story will have parents and children laughing like crazy as they read the book together. The words really only tell half of the story. The illustrations add so much more. For example, one could imagine a nice quiet gathering of children eating ice cream at an ice cream social, but the illustration shows what could be a parents’ nightmare – mounds of ice cream in bowls overflowing with toppings dripping over the sides of the containers, drips and puddles of ice cream on the floors and tables, dropped ice cream cones, ice cream cones piled six scoops high, tight-rope walkers, jugglers and children with sticky fingers and faces.

I loved the imagination of the author and laughed a lot as Prince Dashing searched for Stickerella in the zoo. Children will be delighted as they read about his encounters there.

I thought The Daring Prince Dashing was a delightfully funny rewrite-with-a-twist of a classic fairy tale. I would totally recommend this book to fairy tale lovers young and old! I rated this book 5 stars out of 5.

Thank you to the publishers for providing a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. A positive opinion was not required. All thoughts are my own.

About the Author:

Marilou T. Reeder received a Barbara Karlin Grant letter of merit in 2009. In 2010, she was awarded the SCBWI Pocono Mountain Retreat author scholarship, for writers who show exceptional promise. When she is not writing for children, she keeps busy with freelance business and technical writing. She currently resides in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

Author Links

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