For the curious... Hines basically takes classical fairy tales - predominately Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, but with others showing up -and integrates them to a degree into a fantasy world of his making. The stories center around the island kingdom of Lorindar ruled by King Theodore and Queen Beatrice. Beatrice has a gift of foresight that lets her identify trouble coming ahead as well as other things... including stuff like a good match for her son Armand being this serving girl in glass slippers.
The stories mostly focus around Princess Danielle Whiteshore of Lorindar, whom the bards call Cinderella. During the course of the first scenes of book one (in which her stepsister Charlotte tries to assassinate her and uses magic in the attempt) she learns that her mother-in-law has her own private agents to deal with special threats in Lorindar: Talia and Snow. Snow is, obviously, Snow White (Princess Emillina Curtana of Allesandria) and Talia (full name Princess Talia Malak-el-Dahshat of Arathea) is Sleeping Beauty. Snow is a gifted witch sorceress who specializes in mirror magic tied into her late mother's magic mirror while Talia, well... all those fairy gifts of beauty and grace and speed make her into an extremely skilled physical fighter (and she's more than willing to throw punches too). This is where the stories went wrong, though, as the "happily-ever-after"s didn't happen for them, as both are exiles from their homelands on pain of death; Snow for killing her mother Queen Rose (even if it was in self-defense) and Talia for killing the prince who "rescued" her... by taking advantage of her in her sleep after he and his men slaughtered her entire family. (Hines uses the less Disney-riffic version of the tale in which Sleeping Beauty awakens in childbirth).
Other fairy tales show up, either as key elements in one book or another (the second and third books heavily involve Little Mermaid and Little Red Riding Hood, though the third book also goes even further into Talia's history) or as secondary or tertiary elements (the third and fourth books open, respectively, with Talia and Snow dealing with the likes of Rumpelstiltskin Rumpelstilzchen and Hansel and Gretel). The entire series wraps up in the fourth book, which, well, I won't spoil it for those who intend to read.
I found out about this series while idly viewing an article on Sleeping Beauty on Wikipedia (satisfying curiosity from playing Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep) and let my curiosity do the rest. I'm very happy with the results of that curiosity; Hines' stories aren't super-epic drama, but that's not what they were meant to be. They're fantasy action-adventure stories with a good level of characterization and progression. I recommend them for reading. But i'm also interested in seeing if anyone here has read them as well.
