The Princess Who Forgot She Was Beautiful

The Harry Ferguson Chronicles, Book 1

By: William David Ellis

Narrated by: KC Wayman

Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

Harry Ferguson has a problem. Dragons have blown into his sleepy East Texas town.

And it’s all his fault.

Now here’s what happened....

It is summertime in a small town in Texas. To keep the children of the community entertained, the town librarian has asked her father to come and tell them a story. The old man, known as Hank, is a bit nervous but agrees. Hank begins to tell his mystical fairy tale about a young boy, a princess, a talking sword, and an evil dragon. Hank is a masterful storyteller. In no time at all, he captures the hearts and imaginations of the children and the adults gathered in the library.

In the crowd, there is one precocious and curious little girl who stands out among the rest. Little Sarah seems to immediately become one with the story. Hank and Sarah connect in a peculiar way; somehow Sarah knows what’s going to happen in the story before Hank tells it. As the story unfolds, life in the small town becomes really strange. The fairy tale and the real world begin to meld. As the plot action rises, the creepy eeriness does as well - something is wrong, bizarrely wrong. There are surprises, twists, and turns as the evil dragon is revealed and raises his ugly head! “There are more things we don’t know than we do know”. But nothing compares to the shocking ending.

Warning: Clean, romantic content, strong female characters who love their men and fight and die side by side with them. You will laugh and possibly snort. Do not listen to this book while eating or drinking unless you bring something to clean up. It has Texans with PhDs - they talk funny but are smart - country Texans cast in a balanced light who cuss or come a vowel short thereof (not real bad), pray, and fight for each other, children at risk of demonic rituals, angels in overalls, grandpas that spoil their granddaughters, sword violence, old pickup trucks, and coming in future books in the series, but not yet, sentient dogs and Sasquatches with degrees in chemistry.

©2018 William David Ellis (P)2019 William David Ellis

Great Story! Great Narration.

A unique storyline that hasn't been done a hundred times over. I previously read this book and love the way the narrator did the children's voices, lol. This story has a lost romance, time jumps, action, and a dragon. A boy, who becomes an old man in a time not his own, is still somewhat bumbling his way through the world. His good heart is the one thing that keeps him going in the right direction and will help him save him from evil. Great story!

Enchanting Story

I received this book for free. I am voluntarily posting this review and all opinions expressed herein are my own.

Starting with the cover - it is beautiful - a sword against starry night sky. This book would be good for the entire family [warning for younger children - there are several deaths and some language issues]. I love how this book starts as a storytelling hour at the library and turns into a grand adventure for all involved. I don't want to give anything away as part of the magic of this story is discovering the events as they unfold. There's humor, action, mystery, and plot twists which will keep you guessing in this fast-moving story. There is a cliffhanger ending - which normally would bother me - but I found this story to be so enchanting and engaging that I am looking forward to the next book. This book draws you in and keeps you engaged throughout. Highly recommend!

The narrator, KC Wayman, has a tenor voice which lends itself perfectly to telling a story. His voice gathers you in as you sit back and enjoy this entertaining tale.

Not a Kid's Book

For the first 9 chapters I thought this would be a good book to read to my 5-yr old daughter. Then chapter 10 happened (which I felt was done REALLY well)... and then similar things kept happening... and the ending was especially brutal. I'm still interested to know the rest of the story, but be warned that this book includes death of children, and particularly bad (although thankfully not very descriptive) manners of death too, most of which I felt was unnecessary. I didn't like how the book abruptly ended, and the chapter 1 of Book 2 that was included with the Audible version was about a new character, so didn't shed any light on anything. I felt like the book needed AT LEAST another chapter. (This, along with the amount of child death, is the reason for my overall 3 star rating.)

As far as the story goes, I really liked it. This is a very unique story in that it takes place in East Texas (which is very close to where I live, btw), but it has ancient dragons and magic and whatnot. If you're turned off by people praying, quoting the Bible, etc, you will probably be annoyed, but it was fine with me personally. The author should consider adding some contractions as a lot of the dialogue sounded unnatural without them, but it was an easy thing to overlook. (I think listening to the audio version made this more noticeable than if I had been reading a print version.)

All in all, I would recommend this book to some people, and not to others. I'm interested enough to check out Book 2 whenever it pops up on Audible, if that tells you anything.

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

Great Story, Great Narrator

This is a fantastic blend of fairy tale, suspenseful adventure, and humor. I never knew where it would go next. The narrator is excellent and reads likes a master storyteller, which is the perfect tone for this moving and entertaining tale.

Great writing empowered by a great narrator

This story is remarkable! It starts out so innocently then begins to bend. It tight ropes temptation and then displays the highest integrity and honor. It restores my faith in storytelling. A unique and provocative and restorative work. I love it. I also read some of the other reviews and was amazed by their criticism. Were we listening to the same book? I think not! This is a really good work!

Kind of Meh!

Story never really got going for me.

“I was voluntarily provided this free review copy audiobook by the author, narrator, or publisher.”

What Starts as a Fairy Tale, Ends as a Scary Tale

I'm sure you've had this experience. You start into a book, seem to be really enjoying it, and then the author does something that just ticks you off. The Princess Who Forgot She Was Beautiful was the exact arc that I normally go through for stories like this.


Author William David Ellis & Narrator K.C. Wyman are both new to me. Ellis launches into this book as a fairy tale, being told by the grandfatherly figure, Hank/Harry Ferguson, to a group of young children gathered for story time at the library.


Ellis writes Hank in such a way that you're going to like him, and Wyman's performance for Hank (as well as the other characters in the book) is spot on. As someone who, for my livelihood, reads out loud to others, and who for years has read to my children every night, I appreciated the humor accurately portraying Hank's interaction with his audience & frustrations with interruptions to his storytelling. (Can't tell you how many times I've started the chapter for the night with the kids & have 5 interruptions before I've made it through a paragraph).


Hank begins telling the children an exciting tale of a princess, a peasant, and a dragon from long ago. The initial tale & the children's reactions to his tale is delightful. I had similar reactions of "eww" at same moments in my listen as the kids in the library. The story had me laughing several times to begin with.


Very shortly though, you find out that... maybe it's not just a story. You find out the same time as most of the characters in the book & are brutally brought into a violent conflict "between good & evil."


Now... I Love fairy tales. I love good fantasy. I love conflict & the choices characters are forced to make. And I like both tales that are classic "good vs. evil," as well as tales that are more about a confrontations between more instinctual forces (where good & evil are a little more vague).


Here's what I don't like: Brutal violence no more than for the sake of proving a character is evil. Continued brutal violence against children in particular. Random deaths of characters for no apparent, or little apparent reason. Bait and switch of "fairy tale" to Bullets to the head on the case of this particular book.




And like Steven Moffat & Danny Pink in Doctor Who, Ellis gets us liking a character, just to kill them off (Yes, Moffat - I blame you that I didn't like Peter Capaldi's Doctor half as much as Smith & Tennant). To Ellis' credit, whenever children die in this particular book, there are angels who come before they're actually killed to escort them to the other side. It's a bit too convenient for my taste though & mildly deus ex machina to placate people who have a similar distaste for violence against children. And the villains in this book are way too 2 dimensional. Their motivation is just that they are evil. And if its not evident enough from one brutal act of violence, just wait, there's more. They're all actually satanists! So add ritual sacrifice to that list of distasteful things I don't like about this book.


Then you have the odd relationship between Hank & Sarah. I'm not going to drop any spoilers here, but... It's just weird. By the end of the book, some of the weirdness has been stripped away, but that's not until you've had chapters of awkwardness.


Another thing - The title of the book is pretty well covered, and exhausted in the first 2 chapters or so, and then has next to nothing to do with the rest of the plot, thereby again reinforcing the "bait & switch" that I so particularly disliked.


So you get to the end of the book, and, predictably, you have villains (mostly) vanquished, heros reunited, etc. But for the sake of continuing this on to a series (which I will not be pursuing), we get MORE mindless death & violence, and the final reveal that was so poorly set up, that I was able to guess exactly who the next "bad guy" was, with NO prior forshadowing at all. It just felt incredibly contrived.


Also - if you're going to reference C.S. Lewis, even obliquely, do it right. Wood Between the Worlds, not Woods Between the Worlds.




So - my title for this review - reverse of Court Jester - What Started Out like a Fairy Tale, ends like a Scary tale, and life couldn't possibly... (if you haven't watched Court Jester - Check it out instead of this book - You can't beat Danny Kaye).


Though to call it a scary tale at the end might be giving it too much credit. Some people may be able to overlook the things that bothered me about this story. I wanted to like it, but it just kept compounding things I found distasteful with forced writing.


K.C. Wyman does an admirable job as narrator, but there were several instances throughout the audio of lines being repeated. (I'm sure if you listen to all of mine there are a couple too, but there were at least 4 times in this book that should have been edited out).


So - Writing - 2 stars. I'm giving one there because I did laugh at the right parts and there was at least a little progress. Plot - 2 stars. It was just forced & weird. Narration - 4 stars. I'd give it five if there weren't the repeats.

Overall - 2.5 stars. Wyman almost makes me want to bump it up to 3, but I really just can't. As such, I'd certainly listen to something else he narrates. Just not if it's written by Ellis.

After I listened to this, I found another edition that the cover says "Princess Bride meets Stranger Things in Texas." That is honestly a little closer to what to expect with this book. But both Stranger Things & Princess Bride are better written.

I received this audiobook for free from Audiobookboom.com. All opinions expressed here are without a doubt my own however.

Didn't like it.

This is one of the very few audiobooks I have ever not finished. The narrator was good, but the storytelling was very rambling and internally inconsistent and very literally almost nothing happened plot-wise in the half of the book I made it through. Some of the author's attempts at humor were funny, but most weren't and came off as a little mean, made at the expense of children being typical children. I understood and respected the decision the author made to frame the book as an old man telling a story to a group of children, but it just didn't work. Anyway, don't want to belabor the point. I didn't enjoy it, but as always with a book review, your mileage may vary.