THE TAPESTRY OF TALES

Cia skips school to quash the Evil Queen’s latest scheme and learns a shocking truth about her own family.

Having gotten out from under her personal curse in The Princess Revolt (2022), Cia flies to the rescue—literally. She travels to Paris, in her ultrawealthy friend Romy’s family jet, as soon as she learns that Snow White’s malign stepmother intends to expand her beauty products empire by selling elixirs of persistence, sense of humor, and other qualities forcibly extracted from select children. Though once again upstaged by a vivid supporting cast composed largely of characters who are either stuck in or escaped from folk and fairy tales, Cia shows fair reserves of courage as well as cleverness as her mission undergoes a sudden switch with the revelations that she has an adversary even more evil and powerful than the queen and that her own enigmatic mother is in major danger. Caught in a whirl of plots, subplots, and fairy-tale tropes, she also turns out to be a dab hand with a magic wand, or rather pastry whisk, which not only comes in handy at the climax, but hints that she may be other than the ordinary, nonmagical middle schooler she’s been touted as all along. Stay tuned. Cia and her mom present White; there is racial diversity in the supporting cast.

Side business tends to shoulder past the main plot, but this is an amiable second volume nonetheless.