Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower
By: Tamsyn Muir / Narrated By: Moira Quirk
Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins
Gruesome, gruesome, GRUESOMELY charming… uhm, but ya may barf… barf in a gooood way
Talk about a Fairy Tale… With a Twist! Jeez did author Tamsyn Muir upend a childhood favorite, a Princess in a Tower, and twist and turn and mutilate the heck outta it, or what?!
We start with a very progressive Witch, working a new aesthetic with holding a Princess in a Tower, here Princess Floralinda. A diamond-encrusted dragon guards Flight One, but SURELY some Prince from somewhere will be able to overpower it and thus, go up each further flight until Flight Forty, wherein Floralinda shall be waiting patiently and delicately and demurely. The dragon, the Witch posits? Not so smart from an economical standpoint, but yessss! to blazing new trails with that Flight One challenge!
Floralinda begins her new life in the Tower, and she watches as a single Prince strides up; she holds her breath, jubilant… and then she exhales when she hears >crunching< sounds… and does NOT see the Prince retreat… or ANYthing. First Prince? Down.
More Princes, more >crunching< and more disappointment follow as life up on Flight Forty gets more and more dismal and dull and boring and just plain ridiculously futile. Still, Floralinda, tho’ exasperated, is quite the Princess, amiable even whilst terribly disheartened. But all things change when Cobweb, a garden Fairy, turns up, wings askew, needing the next Full Moon to drench herself in moonlight, healing herself.
Theirs, Floralinda and Cobweb, is a fraught relationship, and things go sneakily and desperately awry as Floralinda realizes that Cobweb is so totally the Brains of the two of them. -But- it works out to where the two of them descend, Flight by Flight, battling monsters and goblins and sirens and unicorns and just EVERYthing a Witch out to make her mark on the world can pack into a Tower.
This is a gross, gross, gross and bloody tale, and good golly gosh did I smile, chortle, or laugh outright. Cuz you see, apPARently I’ve a fondness for Fairy Tales… With a Twist… and with blood and entrails, and making coats outta dead and rapidly decomposing rats.
Now, I’ve done a couple of audiobooks where SAG-AFTRA doesn’t mean zippy-doo SQUAT, with narrators being woefully poorly-cast for a role, or maybe the narrator decided to emote the beJESus outta the performance and just went overboard with it all. But here? Oh goodness, Moira Quirk was sheer, blissful perFECtion! Jeez, canNOT say enough about how she relayed pretty much Every. Single. Sentence that Muir crafted. As Floralinda’s evolvement unfolds, Quirk captures it all and relays the grossness of every action, or the humor between Floralinda and Cobweb. And Cobweb? Well, at first I thought my ears would be hurting because of COURSE, she’s a Fairy, tiny and squeaky. But she herself develops throughout the story, and Quirk relays her spitfire temper tantrums, through to her absolute confusion as she beholds what slaying after slaying, Flight after Flight, has done to this “Princess”. “Moira Quirk, a member of SAG-AFTRA”? You betcha! Wonderful wonderful wonderful, and it’s awesome when a line that coulda made you toss your cookies makes you bray with laughter instead.
Do give Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower a Listen if you just haaaaappen to be in the mood for a sweeeet Princess in a Tower tale that involves Blood Guts & Glory.
And? Oh yessss, it involves chucklesome moments as well!
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