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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781927018576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simply Read Books |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2015 |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.20(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 6 - 9 Years |
About the Author
Qin Leng was born in Shanghai (China), moved to Bordeaux (France), then to Montreal (Canada). She is now living and working as a designer and animator in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in 2006 (Montreal, CA) with a Bachelor degree in Film Animation. She has received many awards for her animated short films and artworks and has worked as an animator and designer at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, CORE digital pictures and Yowza Animation in Toronto.
Read an Excerpt
I. The Beginning, Of Course
Once upon a time there was a princess named Princess Candi. Now, she was no ordinary princess. She was super-duper-extra beautiful and she was also super-duper-extra intelligent. Well, she was intelligent at least. Look, let’s just say she wasn’t totally stupid, okay?
Candi was at least smart enough to know that not just any old prince was good enough for her, and certainly not any old prince that her father (the king, of course) chose for her. What did her father know about choosing princes? He’d never chosen one before. He hadn’t even chosen Candi’s mother, the queen. He’d won her in a high stakes poker game from a wizard who had already lost his watch, a faraway tract of swampland, a rather nice pair of silk boxer shorts, and all his oxen. Unfortunately for the king, the spiteful wizard turned the queen into a large pickle just after Candi was born. The king kept the queen in the pantry now, but she wasn’t much company to anybody, being a pickle and all.
The wizard also placed a spell on the king that made the king a bit, well, silly. Everyone was much too polite to mention the change in the king, but they all noticed it—everyone, that is, except Candi. As long as Candi had been alive the king had been rather, well, goofy, but Candi loved him just the same.
Loved him, but that didn’t mean she trusted him to select a prince for her. The king had never even picked out a suit of clothing for himself, never mind a prince whom his daughter would have to love and cherish and blah blah blah for the rest of her life. The king relied on thousands of servants (well, dozens, anyway) to do boring stuff such as choose his clothes and cook food and start wars. His butterfly collection took up most of his time, but now that Candi was nineteen (as one of his servants pointed out), he decided it was time to find her a husband.
“Daughter, we must talk,” he announced one day. He always called her “Daughter” when he couldn’t remember her name. He had called her “Fudge Nougat” once, and “Ju Jube” another time, but fortunately Candi had misunderstood these as terms of affection. (Hey, I said Candi was smart, not a genius, okay?)
“Yes, Father,” Candi replied, putting down the book of mathematical problems that she had been working on. She found the logic of math soothing.
“It’s time for you to get married,” the king said.
“Okay,” Candi said. (Remember, this was once upon a time, which was a long time ago. It was a time when people did silly things such as obey their parents, get married really young, and eat Brussels sprouts as bedtime snacks.) For three long days she thought about what her father had said, and finally she confronted him, quite distraught.
“Father, I am confused,” she said.
“Why, er, Daughter?” the king asked, putting aside the pretty pink and blue butterfly he was studying.
“It doesn’t add up. How am I to be married, without a prince? You need two people to get married, don’t you?” she asked.
The king shook his head and wondered to himself for the billionth time (or hundredth time, at least) why he had a daughter instead of a dog, a nice cocker spaniel maybe, that would bring him his slippers and his pipe (if he smoked a pipe, that is). All his daughter brought him were headaches, along with an occasional slight cramping feeling in the bottom of his left foot. It wasn’t fair to blame this cramping feeling on Candi, but the king went ahead and did so anyway.
“I will find you a prince, and then you can get married,” the king explained in his best patient-and-loving-father voice.
Candi thought about what her father had said for another three days, and finally, quite distraught, she confronted him.
“Father, I am again confused,” she said.
“Again, my little, er, Jelly Bean?”
“Yes. Why do you have to find me a prince? Why can’t I find one for myself?”
“It’s not tradition.”
“So?”
The king was speechless for a minute. “Well, tradition is tradition,” he finally said, hoping this brilliantly logical statement would satisfy his daughter, so that he could get back to the beautiful green and yellow butterfly he had been examining.
“So?”
Again the king was speechless.
“If I must get involved in this obtuse marriage business, I want at least to choose my future pickle for myself,” Candi said.
“Not all spouses end up as pickles, my little Chocolate Bar.”
This was news to Candi. “You mean,” she said slowly, “that people get married and stay people?”
“Yes.”
A puzzled expression crept across Candi’s face. “And the man I marry, I will have to live with?”
“Forever.”
Candi’s puzzled expression looked like it might stick around for a while. “And he will not turn into a pickle?”
“Probably not.”
Candi pondered this new information for a few moments and came to a decision. “Then I definitely want to find my prince, my husband, my non-pickle, for myself.”
The king glanced longingly at the yellow and green butterfly before him and wished with all his might that his daughter would go away and do, well, something other than what she was presently doing. It occurred to him that if she were to find her own husband, it would occupy her for quite a while, which would give him more time to spend with his beloved butterflies.
“I have made a decision,” he announced in what he hoped was a noble, kingly voice. “I am going to break with tradition and allow you to find your own husband.” Candi threw her arms around her father’s neck.
“Thank you!” she exclaimed. The king smiled at his daughter and, untangling himself from her arms, turned back to his butterfly.
“That’s a beautiful yellow and green butterfly, Father. What is it called?”
“A yellow and green butterfly, of course.”
“How very logical.” Candi carefully filed away this intriguing bit of information in her brain as she dashed off to her room. Finding a prince seemed so exciting that she skipped her daily three to four hours of math equations. She decided to get to work right away on this husband-finding business. That’s when she realized that she didn’t know anything about looking for a husband, or what to do with one if she found one.
Candi’s father was a husband, and what did he do all day? He looked at pretty butterflies and occasionally crept into the kitchen to steal a taste of chocolate chip cookie batter while the cook wasn’t looking. That was it. If that was all husbands did, Candi decided they were a pretty boring lot. She wanted to ask her father if husbands had any other purpose, but her father was a busy man, what with his butterflies and cookie batter and all, and she didn’t want to bother him.
It was time for a mother-daughter talk. She had never had one of these before, but they were what always happened in the novels she read whenever she grew tired of doing math. She went to the pantry and found her mother.
“Mother,” Candi said, “I need to find a husband but I don’t know what to look for.”
Her mother, being a large pickle, said nothing. Candi tried again.
“What kind of man could I live with forever? And how do I find such a man?”
Candi’s mother just sat and did, well, whatever it is that pickles do (which isn’t much beyond not move and be green).
“Pickle pickle in the jar, how can I find husbands near and far?”
Still nothing. Candi felt very frustrated.
“I’m very frustrated!” she said to her mother, before returning to her room. She sat on her bed and waited for inspiration to strike.
Three days later, it struck.
Candi ran as fast as she could to the attic and searched for a certain box. It took quite a while for her to find it (castles have big attics, you know) but eventually she did. It was labelled “Remnants of Candi’s Childhood.” She tore it open and dug around until she found a large book of fairy tales. She opened the book and began reading. Four and a half hours later, she slammed shut the book with a triumphant bang.
“I have calculated how to find a husband!” she exclaimed as she ran downstairs. She found a piece of paper and wrote a list of four ways to find a husband. She pinned the list up on her wall, where she would see it when she woke up every morning. She decided to get started right away on method number one.
“Send all the princes in the area off to slay a dragon or a giant,” Candi read from the list. “Whoever slays it is definitely husband material. You can count on it.”