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For those of you who don’t know the story of the princes in the tower here is a quick re-cap.

There were two princes of England who were eight and twelve when the oldest of the two inherited the throne. Their father had died unexpectedly young and this lead to an unfortunate power struggle. The two boys were ultimately locked up in the White Tower by their uncle, Richard III who then assumed the throne.

Some year or so later the boys mysteriously disappeared. In modern times what is almost certainly their bones were found buried beneath a stair well in the tower which has brought the mystery of their plight and ultimate fate back to the fore-front of modern debate.

This book takes the debate, and approaches it in a very linear and logical fashion. The author lists all of the sources of reliable information and lists not only what she considers to be the best and worst sources, but why she considers them so.

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I have a taste for re-written fairy tales for adults so when I stumbled across this book and found it to be a collection of fairy tales written for adults, here in the 21st century, I was intrigued. It forced me over the limit my husband had “suggested” I spend at the book store but I think he knows me well enough by now to realize any limit he gives me I will invariably go over by four or five dollars.

I wasn’t, going in, expecting fairy glens and unicorns or anything like that. I was wizened up to these sorts of things back in junior high when I first discovered the genre. But, I still wasn’t quite prepared for the direction these fairy tales written for adults took. They were modern, entirely, in the first place. And, secondly, they seemed rather centered around World War II and its aftermath in the UK. Perhaps not so suprising after reading the author bio.

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There has been a lot in the news about this book. It has even been made into a movie. So naturally i was assuming lots of grown up drama and not a little bit of sex to titilate and the like. You can’t have a book about women make it so big without something for the less highly evolved brain to latch onto. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was not only a book about teenagers, I had assumed more like my age in young women, but that it was a book written for teenagers.

Normally books written about and for teenagers, I have found, seem to stick to the high school scene – God forbid there be any place else to live life, the character’s powerlessness – as teenagers and as young women, and the books never lend much credence to the fact that there is life beyond high school- or they only do so in the abstract sense of: “Oh yeah, college.”

This book takes place over a summer – no school. You get a very real sense of the power these young women have, to get up and go, to face their fears and so on. And, since this book distances itself so much from the “school” scene, the fact that there is a future not only of college but beyond college is evident. Life is evident as not only a now but as a fluid thing and that is part of what makes this book incredibly awesome, to me.