I like opera. I’ve always liked opera, as long as I can remember. I think my parents took me to my first opera — Die Fleidermaus — when I was eight or so, and I’ve been going ever since. Of course, I have a degree in music, and so do both of my parents, so we may be a little more open to people singing in Viking helmets than the average family. (Although I’ve never seen any Wagner, thank goodness.) So when I turned over Cameron Dokey’s Sunlight and Shadow and saw “Sarastro” and “Pamina,” I knew exactly where she’d gotten her inspiration for this story. Ms. Dokey was born in the Central Valley of California, and has a degree in archaeology. She currently lives in Seattle, with her husband and several cats. She has written several retellings of fairytales, as well as a handful of “Charmed” and “Buffy” licensed novels.

Sarastro, the Mage of the Day, and Pamina, the Queen of the Night, each rule half of the entire world. They are married and they have a daughter, also named Pamina (called Mina), but they barely get along, due to differing philosophies. Pamina raised Mina, and was supposed to hand her over to Sarastro on her sixteenth birthday to be married to a man of his choosing. The night before her birthday, though, the Mage of the Day enters unexpectedly and kidnaps Mina, intending to force her to marry Statos, his apprentice. Mina, of course, is not particularly enamored of the idea. Her friend and protector in the lands of the Queen of the Night, Lapin, has bells he can use to call birds, but how can that help Mina escape?

Ms. Dokey has changed the book from the opera — W. A. Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” — in several ways, and usually for the better. For one thing, it’s a very male-centric opera. The only women in the story are Pamina (called Mina in the story), the Queen of the Night, and Papagena (Gayna in the story). Pamina is pure, innocent, and our heroine (and sort of boring); the Queen of the Night is evil, but apparently only because she wants to keep her daughter from marrying the wrong man; and Papagena is there solely as a comic female reflection of Papageno (Lapin). In the novel, Ms. Dokey gives the Queen of the Night a real motive; she gives Gayna a lot more agency and a character and background, and Mina herself acquires a backbone and an ability to make her own decisions.

Another change, and Ms. Dokey covers this in her afterword, was that Monostatos in the opera was evil pretty much solely because he was a Moor. Racism much? In the book, Statos is blond and blue-eyed (like everyone in the Kingdom of the Day) and not a bad guy, in particular. I mean, yes, he was part of the antagonistic forces, but overall, he was the way he was because of elements in his past (he’d been orphaned), and he was acting within character. Although I appreciated the change, I thought it might have been more effective had Ms. Dokey let him remain a Moor, but without the evil-ness. I suppose, though, then she’d have to explain why Sarastro had hundreds of blonds in his court and one person of color, so maybe it might have gotten too complicated.

Overall, it’s a very short novel; not even two hundred pages. It changes points of view quite often, and each narrator is easily identifiable. Some, like Lapin/Papageno (I believe that ‘Papageno’ means ‘parrot’), are definitely funnier than others, but overall it’s not really a comic story. A knowledge of the opera is certainly not necessary to enjoy the book; I couldn’t remember much about the opera other than the characters and the basic situation (hey, it’s been seven years since I saw it!). I would recommend this book to middle-grade readers; older ones would most likely enjoy it as well, but it’s awfully short. I finished it in less than two hours. Readers who like fairy-tale retellings will not be disappointed, even though the story was originally an opera. I would definitely be interested in reading other works by Ms. Dokey. 4/5 stars.