the Fiction Demon

This one is an urban fantasy; everyone compares it to Harry Potter and Narnia. That's because it uses most of the same plot devices: an unhappy young man (Quentin Coldwater) gets into a school for magic, and he is fascinated with this Narnia-like fantasy world called Fillory. People complain about how Grossman kind of lazily combined the plots of Harry Potter and Narnia instead of coming up with his own original storyline. But I don't mind familiar plot devices as long as the author does something interesting with them, and I guess I can say that Grossman achieves this. It's certainly interesting enough. This doesn't mean that the plot doesn't have its flaws. It takes strange, unexpected turns, so that it's impossible to even make a guess at where the story is going. This can be exciting, or frustrating, depending on the reader. I think I would have appreciated a little more foreshadowing, so that things had more of a sense of coming together in the end. Like, ...

This next book review is another self-published one. After Morgan Rice, I was afraid to ever read another self-published book, but this one was much better. That's not saying much, compared to my review of A Quest Of Heroes , but still. Unenchanted is Book One in a YA series called An Unfortunate Fairy Tale . The concept is, admittedly, pretty cool: a teenaged girl finds out that she is a descendent of the brothers Grimm and must live out every one of the Grimm fairy tales, surviving all the dangers they bring with them, or the fairy tale curse will fall to her very young brother. There is a lot of potential with this idea. And it was realized. Kind of. A little bit. Okay, there were prblems. First of all, the main character, Mina, is annoying. I get that she is an insecure teenager, but she is constantly throwing a pity party. It gets old. Also, her romance with a popular boy in school isn't easy to get into. It's overly cliché, and that makes sense because it's part ...