The Sleeping Prince is the second book in The Sin Eater’s Daughter trilogy by Melinda Salisbury.
This book follows Errin and while the first book had a character learning that things she believed to be true were not, in the interim between books Errin has had to learn that things she believed were stories are in fact true.
“Once upon a time there was a young apprentice apothecary who lived on a red-brick farm with a golden thatch roof, surrounded by green fields.”
There is an old fairytale of a Sleeping Prince who awakes every hundred years to eat a heart, if he awakes at a certain time then he will go forth into the world and try to claim his throne, killing anyone who stands in his way. This of course, is just a fairytale until it comes true.
“Fortune favors the bold.” I smile weakly. “So does death,””
The Sleeping Prince was mentioned and indeed awoken in the first book, although only towards the end, so this story is the one where the main plot of the trilogy gets underway.
Much of the story of the prince is either told to the reader slowly over the course of the book or we are told different versions as everyone seems to have their own version of the fairytale, while this does make sense for a fairytale – just imagine if Cinderella was suddenly proved real, the confusion between people looking for glass shoes and squirrel fur shoes and others arguing about what “fairy godmother” could possibly refer to outside of a story book would be incredible – it can also be confusing to the reader not knowing which one they’re supposed to believe in – as far as I can work out we are supposed to believe the alchemists version as they are descendants of the sleeping prince’s sister.
“The apothecary, the monk and the living Goddess went to war. We sound like the start of a joke.”
The book sets up the third book neatly, showing clearly how everyone ends up where and why, and how all the characters from the first two books – they followed entirely different people – connect to each other and as soon as I had finished the second book I went to buy the third book in the series The Scarecrow Queen so I could read it straight away.
ChristyESWriter 