Dark Destiny: The Sleeping Beauty Story Your Mother Never Told You

Kym Hackenberger and Melody Lowe
CreateSpace (2008)
ISBN 9781440412417
Reviewed by Avni Gupta (age 15) for Reader Views (2/09)


When I got this book, I was really excited about reading it. It looked amazing! As soon as I started, I realized that this book was not anything like I had thought that it was going to be.  I thought that it was going to be like the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, in which Sleeping Beauty was amazingly lame and boring, but in this one, Sleeping Beauty was a very exciting and complex person! In this story, the witch has her reasons, and altogether, this book makes so much more sense. It is so much better than the original!

It all starts out with princess Elspeth. She is betrothed to a man she does not love and, in fact, he is amazingly horrid to her! She does not want to marry him at all! Enter the tall, dark and handsome warlock that Elspeth falls in love with. This falling in love turns out to be fatal to Elspeth’s love.  After they have been married for a while and Elspeth is pregnant, her old betrothed comes for vengeance. He feels as if Elspeth is his, and because of this, no one else can have her. He comes to where Elspeth and her husband live and he kills her husband. The whole second half of the book is about how Elspeth tries to get vengeance.

Overall, “Dark Destiny” by Kym Hackenberger and Melody Lowe was really good. I love fantasy that is like this. I loved how this entire book was from the perspective of the evil fairy queen. It made everything so much more interesting.  As soon as I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.  I’m a sucker for fairy tales and happy endings, and this book had both of them put together in it!  The authors did an amazing job of making a fairy tale that everyone had heard in their child hood into something even better than it was when they were little. I would love to see other books by these authors!

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