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

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

Entwined by Heather Dixon

Title: Entwined
Author: Heather Dixon
Publisher: HarperCollins/Greenwillow Books
Release Date: March 29, 2011
Pages: 480 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Bought it thanks to Epic Reads Epic Deals, which reduced the price of this ebook and nine others to 99 cents. It's still going through January 31st, 2012, so check that out while you can if you have an ebook reader. More publishers should do stuff like this. JUST SAYIN'.

Azalea is trapped. Just when she should feel that everything is before her . . . beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing . . . it's taken away. All of it.

 

The Keeper understands. He's trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. And so he extends an invitation.

 

Every night, Azalea and her eleven sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest.

 

But there is a cost.

 

The Keeper likes to keep things.

 

Azalea may not realize how tangled she is in his web until it is too late.

Review:

In this retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Princess Azalea and her eleven sisters are in mourning after the loss of their mother, who died after giving birth to the twelfth princess, Lily. Locked up inside their home and pushed away by their father at a time when they need each other the most, the girls are miserable... until they discover a magic passageway that leads to a land of silver and beauty. The Keeper, the man that is trapped there, extends an invitation to the girls, allowing them to come back every night and dance their troubles away. Such an offer comes at a price and Azalea must find a way to put an end to the Keeper before he hurts her loved ones.

For having such a large cast, you would think it would be easy to start mixing up characters and be unable to remember who is who and who likes what. Wrong! Each and every one of the twelve princesses has their own traits and makes it easier to remember who is who. I certainly never mixed up Jessamine, the princess that rarely speaks, with Ivy, who loves to eat Personally , my favorites were Delphinium and Bramble. Girls with a flair for the dramatic (the right kind, the kind that does not irritate me) are so much fun and yet so hard to find. Well, Bramble is more enthusiastic than dramatic, but it's close enough. I love them both.

The writing flowed so well and more than a few times, it was. It brought to mind the Theatre Illuminata series by Lisa Mantchev, which is the absolute best thing it could do because I love that series to death and beyond. Here's one little snippet that made me giggle:

"Is d-dancing allowed?" Clover stammered.

Azalea bit her lip and turned her head away.

"Oooh!" Delphinium lifted a dainty hand to her forehead, closed her eyes, and fell back onto the wood floor. Thum-thump thump.

She lay on the floor, unmoving.

"Oh, get up, Delphi," said Bramble. "When people really faint, they bang their heads up on the floor. It's very unromantic.

There's the strangest similarity between the Keeper, a pretty creepy man I had fun reading about and whose twist I saw coming but OH WELL, and the lead love interests in many currently popular YA paranormal romance books (none of whom shall be named because we know who they are). If I had to compare how certain YA "heroes" act toward their leading ladies and how the Keeper treats Azalea, I would have to say they're almost alike. The difference? The Keeper is the antagonist, not a love interest. What does that say for the state of some of the love interests in YA right now? Not a lot of good, I'll tell you.

Okay, I admit, that was a very cheap shot. I'm full of them today.

Yes, Entwined had a few issues. It develops slowly and the little bits and pieces that are given out at a time might not be enough to keep all readers invested. Heck, I was loving each and every page and even I had trouble keeping my attention on it sometimes! (Okay, maybe that was because I was watching InuYasha while reading much of the novel.) Anyone looking for an actiony book that moves quickly will be pretty disappointed. I should take a star off for it. Will I? No! I am so in love with this lovely, lovely book that it gets its lost star back. It has inspired me to happily squee and as regular friends and readers of mine might now, I AM NOT SO EASILY INSPIRED TO HAPPILY SQUEE OVER BOOKS (unless kittens are involved).

Bonus, but did you know that this author is awesome? Because she is. I found her blog when I was looking to see if she was busy writing away on any other books at this time (and woe, I do not think she is) and she's so funny! Like the little comic strips that show up and how back in March 2011 when her book first came out, she had a giveaway of her book where you entered by coloring in one of three pictures in any medium you wanted and sending it in. This was one of said pictures:



I will not lie: I laughed. I laughed and said, "Oh, that is so Bramble." Fans of fluffy novels so adorable that you start squealing, "This is so effing cute!" (which I have been doing since before I even finished the book) need not look any further. Here is your next read.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: Ignite by Kaitlyn Davis

Ash by Malinda Lo

Title: Ash
Author: Malinda Lo
Publisher: Hachette Book Group/Little, Brown and Company
Release Date: August 11, 2009
Pages: 264 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.

In the wake of her father's death, Ash is left at the mercy of her cruel stepmother. Consumed with grief, her only joy comes by the light of the dying hearth fire, rereading the fairy tales her mother once told her. In her dreams, someday the fairies will steal her away, as they are said to do. When she meets the dark and dangerous fairy Sidhean, she believes that her wish may be granted.

The day that Ash meets Kaisa, the King's Huntress, her heart beings to change. Instead of chasing fairies, Ash learns to hunt with Kaisa. Though their friendship is as delicate as a new bloom, it reawakens Ash's capacity for live--and her desire to live. But Sidhean has already claimed Ash for his own, and she must make a choice between fairy tale dreams and true love.

Entrancing, empowering, and romantic, Ash is about the connection between life and love, and solitude and death, where transformation can come from even the deepest grief.

Review:

Orphaned before she was even a teenager, Ash is no better than a slave in her stepmother's home, working to pay off the debt Lady Isobel believes she owes for being her father's daughter. Ever since she was a child growing up near the Wood, Ash has believed in fairy tales and stories the philosophers from another kingdom dismiss as nothing but follies. Upon venturing into the wood one night, Ash meets the fairy Sidhean and comes to develop a strange friendship with him that could become more. Her feelings only become more complicated after meeting Kaisa, the King's Huntress. One a fairy prince, one a beautiful huntress, both of them people Ash loves. Who should she choose?

Oh, how badly I needed this book to be good. My last book was a disaster and a half, so I ran to this in hopes it would cheer me up. Not to mention this lucky find in a used bookstore turned out to be signed by the author herself, which made me want the book to be wonderful even more. It didn't turn out as well and I'd hoped it would, but Ash was still a great retelling of the well-known Cinderella story.

Ash, Sidhean, Kaisa, and Ash's stepfamily all have the potential to be great characters, but their depths aren't explored deeply enough. I didn't have any real investment in the characters, and I didn't feel any true connections between the characters either. The romance of Ash and Kaisa was sweet, but I wasn't particularly attached to it or convinced by it.

Often, I wondered where the conflict was. Was the old vs. new theme also supposed to be the conflict of the book? There is no real plot, and Ash is not a strong enough character for the novel to be character-driven. Nevertheless, I kept turning the page in no small part due to the writing.

Ah, the writing. Sometimes, the narrative read as though a storyteller and I were sitting in front of a fire. The storyteller told me the story of Ash as I sat there basking in the fire's warmth, letting Ash's story come to mind and become more vivid with each word. Other times, it felt like nothing more than a story that overdosed on telling instead of showing. Some scenes like the hunt were vivid, but most of them failed to stick with me.

Speaking of the old vs. new theme, that had to be my favorite part of the book. Ash's choice to either cling to her old life (Sidhean) or embrace what was new and present (Kaisa), the conflict of the greenwitches and old ways with the philosophers and their new ways--above all else, this is what stayed with me. It may have been just a small piece of the story, but I still loved it. If you can be open-minded and not have a fit if a fairy tale retelling veers from the well-known tales, try Ash and see how you like it.

And a tip for readers? Always do research on a book you're considering or look at the copyright page at the very beginning of the book. After the small project I did on Goodreads reviews of Ash, I feel this is something everyone should keep in mind.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: Watched by Sharde Richardson

Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor

Title: Lips Touch: Three Times
Author: Laini Taylor (illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo)

Publisher: Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books

Release Date: October 1, 2009
Pages: 272 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it in a used bookstore

Everyone dreams of getting the kiss of a lifetime--but what if that kiss carried some unexpected consequences?

A girl who's always been in the shadows finds herself pursued by the unbelievably attractive new boy at school, who may or may not be the death of her. Another girl grows up mute because of a curse placed on her by a vindictive spirit, and later must decide whether to utter her first words to the boy she loves and risk killing everyone who hears her if the curse is real. And a third girl discovers that the real reason for her transient life with her mother has to do with belonging--literally belonging--to another world entirely, full of dreaded creatures who can transform into animals, and whose queen keeps little girls as personal pets until they grow to childbearing age.

From a writer of unparalleled imagination and emotional insight, three stories about the deliciousness of wanting and waiting for that moment when lips touch.

Review

Lips Touch: Three Times is made up of three short stories. In the first, Kizzy comes from an odd family that believes in all sorts of strange things and she desperately wants to be more than just the plain girl from the strange family. Her want is so strong that it attracts evil to her and it just might be the death of her. In the second, Anamique was cursed with a beautiful voice at birth, but anyone that hears it will die. After finding love with a soldier who knows the real her and that believes her corse is a load of bull, she debates whether or not to take the risk and see if her voice can kill. In the third, Esme and her mother are forced to go on the run when the beings they've been on the run from for much of their lives catch up to them. But is that all there is to it?

This is of little importance and you can skip this whole paragraph if you want to, but I've looking for a copy of this book everywhere for months now. The local big bookstore never had one and I was about to give up and order it online. (Don't ask me why I didn't do that in the first place because I have no clue.) Then I went to a used bookstore with my best friend and finally found a copy. The way I screamed "Jackpot!" and basically spazzed about it was truly a sight. The effort and stressing was worth it. Taylor's stories are amazing.

Di Bartolo's illustrations are beautiful, muted in their coloring except for shades of one specific color. They're unclear at first, but readers will understand them and what's going on in them once they've finished the related story. Maybe it would be better to show you some of these illustrations instead of trying to tell you about them:

Each of the stories, as different as they are from one another in subject, all have in common how the explore strong want or desire. Kizzy desperate desire to be extraordinary and more than the average girl from the freaky family (and she is the character I related most to; it's funny how I can relate more to Kizzy in fifty pages that I can to heroines in books upward of three-hundred pages), Anamique's wish to speak to her loved ones and tempt her curse, and... I can't even begin to approach the third story and talk about that. It's complicated.

The writing is beautiful in almost every way it's possible to be. The closest comparison I can make is to a fairy tale, though these stories are a bit more twisted than most fairy tales. I could flip the book open to a random page and find a poetic turn of phrase. Actually, let's do that so you can see what I mean:

"Drinking in his first close sight of her, James already knew her better than any of those others did. He knew from her diary that if she was biting her lip, it meant she was having one of her bad days.

"He had imagined himself, fancifully, to be half in love with the writer of the mysterious diary, but now, seeing her, that vague fancy was swept away by the exhilaration of actually falling in love with her, not by halves, but fully and profoundly. His heartbeat pulsed in his hands with the desire to reach out and touch her ( "Spicy Little Curses Such as These," Lips Touch: Three Times p. 89)."

The stories fly by quickly and before I knew it, the book was over. I won't be forgetting them anytime soon because there was something about all three that made them memorable: "Goblin Fruit" has Kizzy as a character that I greatly connected to, "Spicy Little Curses Such as These" had its mythology and Anamique's strength, and "Hatchling" had its nightmare fuel factor. Not kidding. "Hatchling" was terrifying for so many reasons, especially the Druj and what Mab was forced to go through. You know those stories that are the kind of scary that make you want to wrap up in your childhood/favorite blanket because you hope it will make it less scary? That's what it was for me.

Taylor has a young adult novel called Daughter of Smoke and Bone coming out September 27 and all the pre-publication reviews I've seen for it so far from those who received ARCs (jealousy levels: off the charts) say it's absolutely fantastic (and ARC excerpts promise the same beautiful writing). Lips Touch only made me want the book more because it shows me she has true talent as an author. I beg you to give this book a try.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

The Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley

Title: The Door in the Hedge

Author: Robin McKinley
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Release Date: April 1, 1981

Pages: 216 pages (paperback)

Because this is a short story collection instead of a novel, I will be grading it in a different form than normal. There will be no summary because there pretty much is no summary on this book.

Review:

The Stolen Princess

In the last mortal kingdom bordering the lands of the faeries, children are stolen from the people on a regular basis. Baby boys and of-age girls are stolen away from their families and no one is safe- not even the royal family. First, the Princess Ellian was stolen at seventeen and her twin sister Alora barely recovered from that. Then Alora gave birth to her solitary heir Princess Linadel and on Linadel's seventeenth birthday, she too was stolen away by the faeries.

This story was 77 or so pages long and I didn't like it very much. It dragged on for too long and even for a fairy tale, the love-at-first-sight of Princess Linadel and Donathor wasn't very convincing. In the end, everything tied up in a pretty little bow so that the two could be together without one of them having to give up their own kingdom. I know it's a fairy tale, but this happy ending was just a teaspoon too sweet for my tastes. For one reason or another, the royal family seems to be having psychic dreams all over the place. Fantasy excuses that too, but it's still a little strange because there's no attempt at an explanation.

The Princess and the Frog

When Princess Rana receives a necklace from Prince Aliyander, she accidentally drops it in a special body of water near her palace and the malevolent magic that charmed it disappears. Knowing that she cannot return without the necklace, Rana enlists the help of a talking frog sitting by the lake. In return, the frog asks to live in the castle and because she knows that she must grant his request for helping her, she agrees.

This was a slightly darker retelling of the tale of the same title which most of us are familiar with, but instead of it being about a spoiled princess getting her ball back and learning a little bit of humility along the way, it's about a princess and a frog defeating an evil, magical prince. The loss of the great moral affects the story and while it's still enjoyable, it's not quite the same. At the end, Rana has the time to run all the way outside and get a "flagon" (whatever that is; I'm sorry, but I'm not quite educated enough to know that word) of water from the pond she dropped her necklace in, and pour it over Aliyander, which kills him. It's a stretch enough that she knew the pond water would defeat him, but the they hadn't moved at all when Rana got back. There's no way they would have paused to wait for her while she got the key to killing Aliyander.

The Haunting of the Hind

There is a horse running through the lands known as thee Golden Kind, one that is so beautiful that men will chase after it and if the come home, they are scarred and have lost their minds. When Princess Korah's beloved brother follows the Hind, he is one of the lucky ones and comes back with both his mind and his sanity, but he is slowly wasting away and dying. Willing to do anything to help the brother who has loved her unconditionally when so many people loved her half-heartedly, Korah sets out to find the Hind and save her brother's life.

I preferred this original story over "the Stolen Princess." It was shorter at about thirty pages or so, which meant it was more concise and concentrated on the present time instead of the history of the world. The beginningof it was good, but lost steam at the end. Princess Korah has to leave behind all of her feelings, face down the wizard that traps the hind- a horse who was originally a woman- and ask him to release the hind and her brother. Really? No tricks beyond that? You'd think a wizard would put up more of a fight than that, but he doesn't. The hind's brother- so unmemorable that I already forgot his name- got paired up with Korah at the last second. That was his entire purpose for existing, it seemed. Why did Korah have to be paired with a guy? Couldn't she have stayed single? That would have been a nice divergence from the previous two stories, where the princesses both got guys. It's okay to have some variety- really.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

A middle-aged soldier, weary from fighting for his kingdom for twenty years, hears of a plea from the king: discover where the twelve princesses of the kingdom are going every night to dance, for the are bewitched and the only thing that can save them from the spell is for a man not of the princess' family to follow them to where they go and tell the King after the sun rises. He takes it and with the help of an invisible cloak given to him by an old woman he helped, he just might succeed.

And here was some of the variety that I wanted. Instead of having to read the princess's point of view, we are in the point of the of the soldier, who is never given a name. What's wrong with naming him? Then again, no one has a proper name in this story, so I'll let that slide. This one follows closely to the original tale while still adding its own twist and once again, the added twist kind of messes things up. You remember the old woman that gives the soldier the invisible cloak, don't you? In the original story, she only gives him the cloak and warns him not to drink what the princesses give him. In this one, she informs the soldier of exactly what bewitched the princesses, why, and what he must do to save them. Isn't that strange? In the original story, one can assume she would put together her warnings after hearing others who have taken on the task talking once they failed. How does she know so much in this tale?

Ultimately, this collection of stories wasn't very good. All of the princesses fell flat, each story was the worst kind of long-winded, and they just weren't memorable. I doubt that I will be coming back to reread this book in the future and most likely, I will sell it off once I acquire too many books again. I did enjoy the stories for at least a short time, so they are saved from a worse rating.

3 stars!