Skip to main content

Book Review: Unenchanted by Chanda Hahn

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 of the fairy tale that her life is turning into, but I guess the character himself just wasn't interesting or developed at all. It made the romance uninteresting too. I also wish the book had faster pacing. By the end of it, she only gets through three fairy tales, I think, and she supposedly has hundreds to complete. Definitely could have used more action.
Overall, though, an entertaining read, especially for preteens and younger teens. The prose isn't bad either. Perhaps the concept is expanded and the characters and story better developed as the series goes on. I hope so, but I don't plan to read the other books. The first one was free, but the others are not.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: A Quest Of Heroes by Morgan Rice

This is the first book in Morgan Rice's The Sorcerer's Ring series, about a boy named Thor who is struggling to be a knight, defeat evil, be with the princess, all those things that boys do in cliche fantasy novels. Rice is a self-published author who has become very well-known. It's not because of the strength of her writing, though. This boek is truly awful. It's so bad, in just about every way. I agree with every sentiment expressed in this wonderfully-written review but let me add a few of my own. First of all, the prose is really terrible. There are grammar mistakes, awkward phrasing, continuity errors in the plot ... but okay, so we don't all have a talent for poetic language. Honestly, though, did this author even do ANY revising? At least try! The plot is, of course, a collection of every overused fantasy cliché ever. But, again, that alone is not enough to make the book the affront to fantasy that it is. The clichés were so poorly executed that I felt p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book Review: Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

Okay, so I haven't done a post in like six weeks. In my defense, my computer broke, and it took a long time to get repaired. No excuses, though. I have just graduated from college, and so I'll be so much less busy over the summer. I'll probably do a blog post almost every day out of sheer boredom, so there's that to look forward to. Anyway, on to the book review. Welcome to Night Vale is a wildly popular podcast which is formatted as the community radio show for an indescribably strange fictional town called Night Vale. Every time I try to describe this podcast, that's about as far as I get before words fail me. This is very dark humor, weird fantasy, thoughtful philosophy and utter nonsense all in one beautiful artistic endeavor. But let's talk about the novel. It follows Jackie Fierro and Diane Crayton, two citizens of Night Vale, as they get caught up in a series of reality-bending problems involving a man in a tan jacket. The story is pretty much indepen...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Post: A Harry Potter Moment In Cuba

On this blog, I plan to mostly do book and series reviews. I want to start, though, with a story that illustrates the value of fantasy in my life, and, I believe, in the world. Last summer, I had the privilege of studying abroad for a month in Cuba. I wanted to take classes I needed, work on my Spanish, and, most of all, test my ability to adapt to a new environment. The Caribbean sun was hot, the thick, wet heat that makes it hard to breathe, the language was difficult and isolating, and the food and customs were so foreign to me. Although I knew why I was there, and there were many things which I loved about the experience of living in Cuba, I could not help but feel uncomfortable and homesick. My roommates and others in my school group shared similar feelings with me. One of my roomates, a girl whose colorfully dyed hair melted and turned strange shades of blue and green in the humid heat, loved movies, and had brought a USB with dozens of them saved on it. As the days faded into h...
Post a Comment
Read more