Take everything you have ever thought you knew about fairy tales and their prince and princesses and chuck it out the window.  This sequel to The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom gives all the fairy tale prince and princesses different personalities and abilities.  The princes have to band together to fight an evil power that wants to run the world.  The princesses have to help them, because, in spite of the idea that men are the best in battle, it runs out that they really can’t do anything without the women.

I found the story irritatingly inane – just the thing to appeal to elementary boys. I did get a good laugh out of the titles of the chapters: A Hero Makes It Up as He Goes Along, A Hero Has No Sense of Direction, and A Hero Knows How to Count, to name a few.

The person who wants to rule the world is a sloppy, immature, obnoxious eleven-year-old boy named Deeb Rauber. This unlikely villain is a ruler of a group of bandits and miscreants, who for some reason, give Deeb everything he wants. Evidentally Deeb had appeared in the first book, but I figured out who he was very quickly.

Deeb has an object, a piece of orange jade, that can give its holder incredible power, but he is not even aware that he has it.  The princes and princesses , of course, know what it can do  – so they set out to get it away from Deeb.  Of course, they sort of win and sort of lose, thus setting the stage for yet another book in the series.

I think it might have been a good idea to have the author edit the pictures.  For example, there is a sword fight in which Ella (that’s Cinderella for most readers) slides across a polished marble floor on her knees.  Then she gets up and says, “Thank the pants.” However, the picture opposite the scene is very clearly of a girl in a skirt.  In the same scene, she jumps up and grabs a chandelier, but the picture shows a hanging tapestry – not a chandelier.

If you have the first book, and it is circulating, I would suggest that you buy this one.  If this would be your first book in the series, you need to get ready to buy the first one also.