Snow White Blood Red by Cameron Jace

Title: Snow White Blood Red
Author: Cameron Jace
Publisher: Cameron Jace
Release Date: May 29, 2012
Pages: ebook exclusive
How I Got the Book: Picked it up for free as an Amazon deal.
Purchase: Amazon
Promotional Materials and More: author website

What if all you knew about fairy tales was wrong?

Book description of Snow White Blood Red: A Grimm Diaries Prequel as told by the Snow White Queen:

I have always wondered why you never asked about my name. Was I so superficial to you? So stereotypical and mundane? Why did you treat me as if I were just the monster of the week? You know what I think? You never had the time to really hate me. You wanted to hate me, long before you even met me. You wanted to scrape my existence and avenge your childhood princess by laying all blame on me. What if they didn’t call me the Evil Queen, what if I told you the real story from my point of view instead of hers, would you ever think of me as an angel? Could I ever make you care? I know that deep inside of you, you adore me,but you’re just scared, afraid to admit how much you love the Snow White Queen.

This Grimm Diaries Prequels are a number of short books in the form of epistolary diary entries. The diaries are more of teasers for the upcoming series: The Grimm Diaries, allowing you to get a glimpse of what to expect of the series.

Review:

After discovering Bargain eBook Hunter about a month ago, I've picked up numerous free YA ebooks, and Snow White Blood Red (along with the next two prequels, Ashes to Ashes and Cinder to Cinder and Beauty Never Dies) was one of my finds a few days ago when it was still free. Numerous friends of mine have Snow White Sorrow, the first book of the Grimm Diaries series, on their to-read list, but if the quality of the novel is anything like the quality of this prequel, I certainly won't be reading it when it comes out.

The idea behind this prequel is a good one: the Evil Queen from Snow White setting the record straight after the Brothers Grimm twisted the story in order to lock immortals like Snow White, the Queen, and other fairytale people away in the Dreamworld they created. The Queen's personality is a little bland, but her narrative voice--when it's being consistent, that is--works well and the little bit of ego she shows in one passage impressed me.

If only awkward phrasing, grammar flubs, basic errors in dialogue formatting, and strange figurative language didn't mess it up. The version I read is apparently improved from a previous version of Snow White Blood Red that Jace published, but there are still plenty of errors, like this:

It [the snow] lay grisly over the contour-lined land like a dead girl’s white coat made of the fur of dead polar bears, like a white wavy carpet that was in no way magical. The curves of the land made the snow look like there was a beautiful gigantic dead girl buried underneath it.

and this:

Her sucking was ticklish. After all, her teeth hadn’t grown yet so it was a funny feeling that I felt.

This was not ready to be published yet. Not by a long shot.

The prequel actually seems to contradict itself. In the one moment she deviates from her formal, pleading tone, the Queen says "I knew my daughter would grow up to be a kick-ass girl one day," the pithy excuse she offers is that she's been around since 1812 and seen everyone from the Brothers Grimm to Lady Gaga, so of course her language would change. But then it's explicitly stated that the Sleeping Death all the immortals are cursed with only allow the immortals to be awake and out of the Dreamworld they're trapped in for a brief period of time every one-hundred years. If this is supposed to make sense because the Queen is still able to see what is going on in the "real" world while under the Sleeping Death's curse, it's terribly explained.

Since I already have the next two prequels, I'll be reading them too. I've got my fingers crossed that they will be better than Snow White Blood Red and won't waste their potential.

1 star!

What am I reading next?: Ashes to Ashes and Cinder to Cinder by Cameron Jace

Eternal Starling by Angela Corbett

Title: Eternal Starling
Author: Angela Corbett
Publisher: Pendrell Publishing
Release Date: December 6, 2011
Pages: 320 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.
Purchase/Pre-order: Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Promotional Materials and More: book trailer | author website

A love so strong, even eternity can’t separate them.

Evie Starling has lived a relatively uneventful life hanging out with friends, gossiping about boys, and driving her 1966 Mustang. All of that changes when she moves to Gunnison, Colorado, to start college and meets two mysterious men.

For centuries, Alex Night and Emil Stone have yearned for Evie—but they each have their own reasons for wanting to be with her. When both men claim to be her soul mate and tell her about an unbelievable past, Evie learns that she’s not the person she thought she was. Soon, Evie finds herself in the middle of an age-old battle between the Amaranthine Society—the soul protectors, and the Daevos Resistance—the soul destroyers. With a past she doesn’t understand, and a future rife with danger, Evie has to decide who she can trust. But Alex and Emil aren’t the only ones who want Evie, and her soul is about to become the rope in an eternal tug-of-war.

Review:

"Alex had just met me. Why would he care if I went careening off a cliff?" -Eternal Starling, 3% mark on my Kindle

That was a warning. After all, if Evie thinks there is something wrong with another having the common decency to not want a person to go careening off a cliff, there may be something wrong with her. Did I listen to that warning? Not for a second, and did I ever pay for it! My violent dislike of love triangles aside, I thought Eternal Starling was going to be a good book, but its half-awesome, half-infuriating heroine, unlikable love interests, badly done love triangle, and slow-moving plot killed it for me.

Half the time, I liked Evie. She took little to no bull from her boyfriends and she had so much backbone that I wanted to ask her to donate some of it to YA heroines in need. If only we could get the truly fantastic girls to share the wealth, YA would be a better genre for all! But I'm derailing myself. The other half of the time, I could not stand her. In addition to the quote at the beginning of the review, she lets her hormones control her brain--and she admits to it. It does not make me like her any more when she admits to it. It just makes me think she's even dumber.

Let's say it together: reincarnation does not excuse insta-love even if they knew each other in a past life. It is not an excuse to skip over development either. Here, we get not one, but two cases of insta-love, and I wondered for a minute if Anthony Sullivan and his pitchman ways had anything to do with this book. This story is driven by the love triangle (after all, most of what you see in the jacket copy is only just getting hinted at around the halfway mark) and giving it no development is a death sentence. Why does Evie have two soul mates when people are only supposed to have one? Hell if I know and hell if the book has an answer.

Both of her love interests can go jump in a pit of vipers. Alex constantly criticizes Evie's independent spirit, which led to me literally shouting expletives at my Kindle, and he always found a way to rub me wrong. Emil was not as offensive to the senses, but his mushy, annoying attitude got on my nerves. Some of the things he said to her and the way he kept just as much from Evie as Alex did is what sentences him to the pit. I get more excited watching my two inside cats attack than reading about Emil and Alex fighting over Evie. (And really, my cats are hardly fighting; the kitten jumps on our overweight cat and the two run around the house hissing at one another.)

My main reason for hating them both? When Evie uses her backbone to stand up to her, they shut her down almost every time. What the hell?! I love backbones, but when they are chained down by other people like Evie's is constantly, it's almost preferable to have a spineless heroine! Between seeing a heroine rarely stand up for herself and then seeing one stand up for herself but be told to sit back down and shut up, I can't decide which one I dislike more.

When the plot finally steps in, the greater antagonist's motives are poorly explained. I get why the Amaranthine Society tries to help soul mates, but what does the Daevos Resistance get out of breaking them up? The explanation the book offered (they're evil and building an army) was poor. They're never explored any deeper than "they're evil" and the flat picture it paints takes away a lot of the tension. I did like the idea of the two groups, but they're so shallowly covered that they aren't much good. The specific antagonist, a  Daevos Clan, isn't much better.

And I suppose this teaches me not to listen to one particular book blogger. They may be popular and many people may love them (to be fair, this blogger really is a sweet person), but their reviews never match up with my tastes and the books they tend to love the most are the ones I hate the most. Remember, everyone: make sure the people you rely on for book reviews have tastes that match yours in some way. Otherwise, you end up like me, buying books you hate because someone whose tastes are unlike yours said it was awesome.

1 star!

What am I reading next?: A Temptation of Angels by Michelle Zink

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

Title: Enchanted
Author: Alethea Kontis
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Harcourt
Release Date: May 8, 2012
Pages: 305 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: ARC provided by Amazon Vine
Purchase/Pre-order: Amazon; Barnes and Noble; Book Depository


It isn't easy being Sunday's child, not when you're the rather overlooked and unhappy youngest sibling to sisters named for the other six days of the week. Sunday’s only comfort is writing stories, although what she writes has a terrible tendency to come true.

When Sunday meets an enchanted frog who asks about her stories, the two become friends. Soon that friendship deepens into something magical. One night, Sunday kisses her frog goodbye and leaves, not realizing that her love has transformed him back into Rumbold, the crown prince of Arilland—and a man Sunday’s family despises.

The prince returns to his castle, intent on making Sunday fall in love with him as the man he is, not the frog he was. But Sunday is not so easy to woo. How can she feel such a strange, strong attraction for this prince she barely knows? And what twisted secrets lie hidden in his past - and hers?

Review:

Rare are the books I find so painful that reviewing them becomes a chore; writing a review means thinking about them when I would rather leave them forgotten. Despite hopes that it would not turn out as such, Enchanted is one of those books.

As I do every time I read a fairy tale retelling, I hoped Enchanted would dump the insta-love element most retellings choose to keep and develop Sunday and Rumbold's relationship properly. I cannot get that lucky, apparently. One day after meeting, Sunday is sure she is in love; after three days, she kisses him and her true love turns him back into a human being. Their interactions are unconvincing whether Rumbold is a human or a frog. Sunday's sisters, like dreaming poet Wednesday and strongwoman Saturday, are more interesting than Sunday herself or her romance.

I'm an intelligent reader. I might say a novel confuses me, but no matter how convoluted the explanation or reasoning might be, I get it at some point. Enchanted's explanations for everything, from the makeup of Sunday's family to how Rumbold came to be a frog to almost everything beyond, are lacking and hours of puzzling have not brought me any closer to figuring out what the book was trying to say. Unclear, stiff, and sometimes clumsy writing put me off reading the novel every time I tried to get back to it.

Now pick a fairy tale. Any fairy tale at all. Chances are that whatever fairy tale you picked made an appearance in this novel. Without going back and looking for more examples, I can say I saw The Princess and the Pea, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Princess and the Frog, Rapunzel (really just her tower), and even the "There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" nursery rhyme (if you think about it). Some people are going to immensely enjoy how many fairy tales make an appearance no matter how brief or insubstantial those appearances are, but I thought the haphazard use of every major fairy tale was too much.

My color-coded master list of 2012 releases I want to purchase has over one-hundred books on it and Enchanted was on it with the color indicating vague anticipation. Well, it's not anymore. I'll save myself the ten to twenty dollars I would have spent on the novel for a book that is worth my time.

0 stars!

What am I reading next?: Darkness Becomes Her by Kelly Keaton

Taken at Dusk by C.C. Hunter

Spoilers like whoa, readers. By the time you finish this review, you'll know a lot about Taken at Dusk and the Shadow Falls series.

Title: Taken at Dusk
Author: C.C. Hunter
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Release Date: April 10, 2012
Pages: 380 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: ARC swapped with another blogger
Purchase: Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Book Depository

Kylie Galen wants the truth so badly she can taste it. The truth about who her real family is, the truth about which boy she’s meant to be with—and the truth about what her emerging powers mean. But she’s about to discover that some secrets can change your life forever…and not always for the better.

Just when she and Lucas are finally getting close, she learns that his pack has forbidden them from being together. Was it a mistake to pick him over Derek? And it’s not just romance troubling Kylie. An amnesia-stricken ghost is haunting her, delivering the frightful warning, someone lives and someone dies. As Kylie races to unravel the mystery and protect those she loves, she finally unlocks the truth about her supernatural identity, which is far different—and more astonishing—than she ever imagined.

Review:

One star? Not zero like it was with the last two books? You're seeing things right. Taken at Dusk was terrible from beginning to end just like its predecessors, but it showed itsy-bitsy signs of improvement. Kylie is still a terrible person and a poor character and the plot barely has any idea what it's doing, yet it's a start.

So the positives: there was something driving the plot of the novel at least half the time. The disappearance of Kylie's grandparents was easily forgotten, but there was the occasional visit from Red and the threat of things trying to kill her (I was always cheering for nature to win that battle, as I'm sure you can guess). When it came up that her boyfriend might be controlling her, Kylie demonstrated the presence and use of .5 brain cells (only .5 because she was still a dolt) by getting worried about it. Fantastic! Entire chapters passed by without a comment from me.

Well, that's it for the praise. Otherwise, this is just as badly written, badly plotted, and easily poked at as the other two books. From panties on fire (she really should see a doctor about that--and take her most recent partner with her) to so much soda that it drowns an Italian fish (but the book does not specify if that much Diet Coke will drown a Vietnamese or Chilean fish), some of the unintentionally hilarious lines in this book can't be made up.

We finally find out what Kylie is! Are you ready for this?

She's sexy and she knows it.

A chameleon. Came right out of the book. The way I read it, she can transform into whatever supernatural being she wants to be, complete with their brain pattern and powers. So she's not the sexy strutting chameleon pictured above. She's just your average Mary Sue in a sea of girls coming out of Hogwart's sorta-secret Sparklypoo house. Characterization is still poor and this is evidence of it. Now that I have saved you about 1,000 pages of reading just to find out what she is, let's move on.

I'm not sure I've seen them do much campy stuff at this camp. You've got your basics of getting up and going to bed, Campmate Hour, the occasional campfire, and eating meals. Does my mind skip over Kylie participating in activities or exercises meant to foster better relationships between the different groups of supernaturals? It's always about her love drama or her friends' love drama or someone trying to kill/kidnap Kylie or scenes meant to fluff up the book. Boring!

The series tend to make a lot of funny word choices. By funny, I mean borderline problematic. Fredericka, the werewolf who loves Lucas and hates Kylie and is overall a piece of cardboard, is often called a she-wolf, reducing her from a person to an animal. I've seen it multiple times where Kylie referred to her boy toys as "sexy as sin" or something along those lines. Why keep comparing boys to sin? Is a girl liking a guy really that bad? What, are girls going to be sluts next just for looking up at a guy through her eyelashes?

There appears to be a quota for unfortunate implications in this series because there's a new one every book. This time around, we have a character one of Kylie's love interests used to have sex with. She is as sweet as can be and never treats Kylie or her friends badly, but Della calls her a slut and the other girls don't exactly object. When the three of them decided to befriend the character, I felt sorry for her. She deserves better than people who call her names behind her back. I really thought this series grew out of the slut shaming, but apparently now. So they're friends, her interest in Derek is no more, she's caught in Kylie the Mary Sue's trap...

And then she dies.

Yeah, calling a female character a slut for having sex with one of Kylie's love interests when Kylie was hardly speaking to him anymore, and then killing her off later? Not a fantastic move.

We also had Kylie, who is a pretty terrible person, being compared to Mother Teresa multiple times with narrative support of characters from all different perspectives complimenting her. What a way to insult the legacy of Mother Teresa: compare her to a judgmental teenager who sees other girls as rivals, slut shames rampantly, and is overall a narrow-minded bucket of vomit. (What? I've got to get creative now that I've decided to drop the use of gendered insults.) Mother Teresa was not perfect, but she's far above Kylie's level.

But you guys. You guys. I think I might not actually bother with the next book, Whispers at Moonrise. This is my cat-scratch series and also something reliably terrible that makes me appreciate the good books more, but now it's showing signs of improvement. It was only a baby step forward, but that's not good. When you follow a horrible series solely because it's horrible, why keep following it when it starts to improve? Same old shtick here: fans will love it, non-fans won't, etc. At least there was minute improvement. Maybe that will make me stay away next time.

1 star!

What am I reading next?: This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers

When You Were Mine by Rebecca Serle

Title: When You Were Mine
Author: Rebecca Serle
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/Simon Pulse
Release Date: May 1, 2012
Pages: 334 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Simon & Schuster Galley Grab (specifically, the author tweeted the link)
Purchase:  Amazon; Barnes and Noble; Book Depository

What's in a name, Shakespeare? I'll tell you: everything.

Rosaline knows that she and Rob are destined to be together. Rose has been waiting for years for Rob to kiss her--and when he finally does, it's perfect. But then Juliet moves back to town. Juliet, who used to be Rose's best friend. Juliet, who now inexplicably hates her. Juliet, who is gorgeous, vindictive, and a little bit crazy...and who has set her sights on Rob. He doesn't even stand a chance.

Rose is devastated over losing Rob to Juliet. This is not how the story was supposed to go. And when rumors start swirling about Juliet's instability, her neediness, and her threats of suicide, Rose starts to fear not only for Rob's heart, but also for his life. Because Shakespeare may have gotten the story wrong, but we all still know how it ends.

Review:

When You Were Mine boasts a problematic premise that originally warded me away from it. In Romeo and Juliet, the infamous play this book is a modern retelling of, Romeo is a fickle dickbag who dumps the woman he is supposed to love for someone else he met while trying to see her. He is the problem, not a victim of the problem. In When You Were Mine? Romeo is merely the victim of Juliet, who stole him from Rosaline. I side-eyed the book over this, but I gave it a try when the chance to review it came along. It couldn't live up to its horrible blurb, right? Some great books have had terrible blurbs.

It turns out the book lived up to its blurb after all.

The first seventy pages grated on me so badly that I nearly gave up. Rose describes one of her friends as "bleating" and I side-eyed her further over her views of how girls have the "subtle ability to warp actual circumstances into something different.: Even when she says she's not trying to say girls get delusional, that is pretty much what she's saying. Her friends Olivia and Charlie aren't much better; they resemble the mean girls who spread rumors and give people negative nicknames they can't get rid of. Their characters and most other supporting characters have all the depth of a drop of water.

I can hardly begin to describe all the problematic issues this book helps perpetuate. A minor one is exotification--one character who hails from Belgium referred to by his name (Jhone) only once and is called the Belgian for the rest of the book. Reducing someone to their nationality? Not funny. Encouraging slut shaming and saying a girl's sexual activity defines them? Not funny. Encouraging girl hate by immediately labeling a new girl as "competition" to the main character? Not. Fucking. Funny. The largest ones, the Taylor Swift Syndrome and making Juliet out to be a man-stealer, are discussed a little later.

The nicest thing I have to say is that Rose has great chemistry with her love interests when having romantic interactions with them. When she and Rob are on their date, their awkward yet sweet interactions were fantastic. Once Rose starts growing closer to Len after Rob has left her for Juliet, their scenes feel real. Len is probably my favorite character, seeing as he is the main voice of reason throughout the book. I also appreciate that the book does not take pains to do what other retellings do and present Romeo and Juliet (in this case, Rob and Juliet) as being truly in love. You can't mistake it as anything other than a disaster in the making.

We all know what Taylor Swift Syndrome is, right? In case you don't, I'll explain (and I use heteronormative terms because that was the case in this book; the genders of those involved can change): Girl Next Door loves Boy, but Boy doesn't quite realize that yet. Then along comes Mean Girl, who sweeps Boy away and "steals" him from Girl Next Door. Once everything runs its course, Mean Girl gets her "just desserts" and Girl Next Door has Boy. This gains its name from Taylor Swift because her song "You Belong With Me" and the music video for it exemplify this situation well.

I hate Taylor Swift Syndrome passionately. As the events run their course, I feel Girl Next Door often turns out to be more of a mean girl than Mean Girl, who comes out of the situation looking like the real victim. Her only crime is going for the guy she wanted. Taylor Swift Syndrome is pretty much the story of When You Were Mine and instead of siding with Rose, I side with Juliet. She is the true victim and I wish I could give her the support she needs.

No one ever tells her that Rob and Rose were involved, you see. Why is she shamed for going after a guy she likes when no one, including the guy or her own cousin, will tell her he is involved with someone else? She's not a mind-reader. It's like knowing a child will go in the cookie jar and refusing to tell them that doing so is going to get them in huge trouble. Despite what the characters claim, Juliet did not steal Rob from Rose. Rob left Rose for Juliet just like Romeo did in the play and he is still a dickbag for it. Juliet is still the victim, not a man-stealer like the book tries to make her out to be.

Do we really need more girl hate in YA? Do we really need more slut shaming of someone whose only crimes are being proactive, showing some skin in an outfit, or not sticking to outdated gender roles? I don't think we do. We need far less of it.

To be fair, there was massive improvement in the last fifty pages. Depth I'd been searching for the entire time came out and it at least tries to stop demonizing Juliet. Unfortunately, the efforts will be in vain; between cultural views the book perpetuates and reflects in equal measure, previous characterization of Juliet, and the details of the rumors being spread about it, what is done to "redeem" her (in quotation marks because as I have explained, she didn't do anything wrong) will not be enough. If you're sick of girl hate and Taylor Swift Syndrome, stay far away. Save yourself the time and pain.

1 star!

What am I reading next?: Coraline by Neil Gaiman