Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: In a children’s fairy-tale story, a noble young man may marry a princess, but chooses her brother the prince instead. That’s right, it’s the plot of King and King
Yes. While King and King focuses on the problem of choosing a spouse, The Bravest Knight centers around the protagonist’s chivalric adventures, which eventually lead him to encounter his love interest. King and King also has all of the other characters pressuring the prince to marry a princess; in The Bravest Knight, there is no such pressure, even though the story subtly conveys that the knight is defying expectations by marrying the prince.
Errico, like de Haan and Nijland, deserves credit for a setting that is more whimsical and fun than many LGBT-inclusive kids’ books. He tells us the story of Cedric, a poor but brave knight who grew up on a pumpkin farm. Cedric’s tale is a little more involved than that of King and King, taking us from his childhood through his training and the rescuing of a prince and princess from a fire-breathing dragon. When the princess says she’d like to marry him (a nice bit of self-empowerment for a fairy tale princess), he gently demurs, saying he wants to marry the prince instead.
The king at first refuses without explanation, but then relents and allows the wedding. At first, I thought the unexplained refusal might confuse children, but now I think that if children have encountered anti-gay sentiment in the real world, this may give them the assurance that some people do change their minds. If they haven’t, parents may simply put the king’s brief reluctance down to the fact that the couple just met. In any case, he is much more understanding than the royal parents of King and King.
Cedric handles the dragon in a clever and non-violent way. I also like that Errico makes it clear that Cedric knew he was gay from the time he was a boy. My only quibble is that Cedric’s mother (we never see his other parent) appears only briefly in one early scene, and then isn’t seen again, even when her son leaves to be a knight. She doesn’t even appear in the wedding scene, although we are told “all their family and their friends” are there.
The meter is sometimes a bit bumpy, but mostly keeps the story trotting along like a knight’s horse. The illustrations, by Mo Qovaizi, have an odd mashup of fairy-tale medieval garb and near-modern dress, but are bright and cheery.
My main criticism is not of the book itself, but of the genre: We now have two picture books about a prince (or knight, which in fairytales is close enough) marrying a prince. Someone needs to write one with a princess marrying a princess.
The Bravest Knight, produced by Errico’s Pajama Publishing, is only available as a Nook Read to Me book from Barnes & Noble (with written text and voice-over), or as a Hulu video you can see online. Watch and listen to it below (or use this link if the embedded version isn’t working for you).
