I vividly remember when I first realized that fairy tales were actually fashioned after some perhaps gruesome or extremely sad premises. Looking for a successful conclusion or happily ever after resolve, the stories themselves were rather steeped with possible harsh events. Most certainly life-altering for some characters. Think of Bambi. The first scene is hearing a gunshot. That gunshot made Bambi an orphan. Even the Frozen story starts when the sisters’ parents die in a boating accident leaving the two of them to sort out how their strained relationship will go. I am sure you can think of many.
So here’s what Jude Deveraux has done. In ORDER OF SWANS we revisit the nursery rhymes/fairy tales of our childhood with an inventive, interesting, and often ghoulish twist. A sort of time travel through Mother Goose. Do I have your attention yet?
Jude Deveraux has a knack for time travel. And in ORDER OF SWANS, we visit another planet that has a large population of strange, interesting characters both two and four-legged, some with wings, all with some seemingly magical quality. And we are on a mission. To help our lady from Earth, Kaley, helps this planet ferret out problems one at a time so she can return home. Kaley has always been different. So her parents homeschooled her. Her best friend Jobi has taught Kaley many interesting skills. And with her father’s blessing of sorts, Kaley is now on planet Bellis.
Kaley meets Tanek and his son Mekos. They are of the Order of Swans. Their family has taken care of the swans and has some intriguing abilities. They are good folk who are in the middle of an adventure of sorts. Helping get the Prince to his impending marriage to a Princess. This union is to help their homelands in their quest to survive. There are evildoers – aren’t they everywhere? Well in Bellis it is a matter of landownership and rights.
Jude Deveraux cleverly matches up earthly issues with those on this planet. The difference is the abilities some of the inhabitants display. Many are a force to reckon with. Most are peaceful. Remember all fairy tales have an appearance of an evil character. In ORDER OF SWANS Jude Deveraux has Kaley traveling this planet and facing down some of these fairy tale monsters using Kaley’s knowledge of books to assist Tanek. There are times that are really amusing...a strange twist on an old story remarkably familiar to most, if not all of us.
For example, we encounter the witch from Hansel and Gretel. And so many others.
So while reading ORDER OF SWANS you definitely have to suspend disbelief and remember you are now entering the world of Jude Deveraux and her imagination. It’s too wondrous to allow a writer of a review to reveal many characters and situations. Suffice it to say, it is an adventure.
In this spellbinding, fantasy-rich novel, a woman is swept into a world where she has the power to alter fairy tales, and change a kingdom’s destiny…
To Kaley Arens, a PhD student and expert in folklore, fairy stories have always had a power and an allure beyond mere entertainment.
It’s only when Kaley accompanies her lifelong friend Jobi on a visit to his home that she realizes how much she still has to learn. Bellis isn’t the remote island that she believed it to be. It’s another world—a stunningly beautiful and seductive one, with its own royalty, its own rules, and inhabitants who breathe life into the tales she was taught were fiction.
Kaley’s presence is no simple holiday. She has a mysterious connection with Jobi and with Bellis, and abilities that may help determine this world’s fate. Tasked with locating a lost prince, Kaley and her companions—the enigmatic Tanek, a member of the Order of Swans, and Sojee, Kaley's colossal bodyguard—journey through a land both thrilling and terrifying, where the uncanny and the familiar go hand in hand.
But in fairy tales, heroes and villains are easy to discern. Here, nothing is quite as it seems. And though Kaley is discovering that she can change the outcome of the fairy tales she knows so well, her own story is unfolding in ways impossible to predict, with a destiny she could never have foretold…