The Storybook of Legends

The Storybook of Legends is a novel by the American writer Shannon Hale, published in 2013 and the first book of the Ever After High series.

Raven is expected to be wicked, and the novel takes her reluctance seriously rather than as a joke: she has been told since childhood that her signing is a condition of the world continuing, and the friends around her, including Apple White, whose destiny as the fairest of them all depends on Raven being the villain, have their own reasons for wanting the ceremony to go ahead. The school's staff, its traditions and the book itself all enforce the arrangement, and the novel's tension comes from how difficult it is to be the only person who has asked whether the arrangement is fair. Hale writes the school as a boarding school with a curriculum, a social order and a set of teachers who are themselves the products of their stories, which is what lets the book ask its question properly: what happens to a world of fates when one person declines hers. The series was written to accompany a larger franchise of dolls and animated specials, and it was one of several projects in which Hale retold or revised traditional tales for younger readers.