TALL TALES

Efforts to stop the evil Golden King from covering the world in shadow magic lead to revelations—not all of them pleasant—for plucky, uncommonly short giant Lena.

Picking up where he left off in Once Upon Another Time (2022), Riley takes his 5-½-foot-tall protagonist down a grim (not to say Grimm) path. At the behest of the deceptively benign fairy queens, Lena, along with Rufus, her faithful puss in seven-league boots, and genie would-be boyfriend, Jin, embarks on a quest that pits her against a fiendishly insidious foe who somehow knows all her gnawing fears and weaknesses and just how to use them. Though meetings with the big bad Wolf King’s gleefully bloodthirsty daughters and a tiny prince of Lilliput, whose tough talk only makes him more adorable, lighten the tone, overall, it’s Lena’s agonizing struggles to suppress rather than understand her own violent tendencies that stand out on the way to what the author himself acknowledges is a “horrible, horrible ending.” Rescues yet to effect and the discovery of a new, even viler scheme to stymie point to future exploits…but by this point, even readers trained to expect happily-ever-afters will know to take to heart a character’s comment that “writers are always the true villains of their stories.” The folkloric human and magical casts largely present White.

Disturbing developments in a series dark of humor, outcome, and, if portents hold, future.