Review: Unenchanted by Chandra Hahn

Mina Grime is unlucky, unpopular and uncoordinated, that is until she saves her crush's life on a field trip, changing her High School status from loser to hero overnight. But with her newfound fame brings misfortune as an old family curse come to light. For Mina is descended from the Brothers Grimm and has inherited all of their unfinished fairy tale business. Which includes trying to outwit a powerful Story from making her its next fairytale victim.

To break the fairy tale curse on her family and stop these deadly events, Mina must finish the tales until the very Grimm end.

Kindle Edition, 233 pages

Published 2011 by Chanda Hahn 

(summary grabbed from GoodReads)

The idea for Unenchanted itself is amazing and I can honestly say I was sucked in for most of the book.  However, I almost want to steer anyone planning on reading away as the hiccups in this one were pretty bad.  In YA literature, there are many great fairy tale retellings, so I can’t recommend a book that I struggled through at points when there are so many others that I whole-heartedly enjoyed to the last word.

What I did like about Mina was that she did seem like a teenager.  Her voice actually felt like that of a young girl. Other than that, Mina was not particularly likeable.  She was your typical “normal” young adult main character, made complete with shyness and an inferiority complex.  If you’re looking for a strong heroine kicking Grimm-fairy-tale-ass and taking names, look elsewhere.  Mina was borderline whiney at times and grated on my nerves.

Most of the dialogue was atrocious.  It wasn’t that it wasn’t authentic for a teenager, it wasn’t authentic for anyone.  No one talks like that.  The only character whose dialogue sounded like a real person was Mina’s best friend, Nan.  Nan had more personality than the rest of the cast of characters combined and was incredibly likeable.  Unfortunately, Nan is not the main character.

But the most upsetting thing about Unenchanted was the amount of typos.  There were misspelled words, words missing, and other issues on top of that.  This is completely unacceptable in a published book, self published or otherwise.  If you’re going to publish a book, it should be something you poured your heart into and have gone over repeatedly.  Clearly, the author put absolutely no time into editing her book.

Nevertheless, I am still intrigued with where this is going as Unenchanted did have an interesting and original plot.  I probably will pick up the Chandra Hahn’s next book in the series.  I guess this makes it a mixed up review...at first I'm like "Don't read it!" and then "I'm gonna read the sequel."  What I mean is: Unenchanted is flawed, but the story is original and interesting.

Final Thought:  6 out of 10 taodstuls

This review is also posted on GoodReads

Save-a-Word Saturday (#1)

Welcome to Save-a-Word Saturday, a new blog hop hosted by The Feather and the Rose.
The aim is to spread love of old and unusual words by sharing them with other bloggers and thereby saving these precious, wonderful, whirling words from the dusty, lonely corners of the oldest, least visited vaults of the Word Bank.

The rules run thusly:

1. Create a lovely blog post that links back to this one. The easiest way to do that would be to grab the code under our pretty Save-a-Word Saturday button. Just copy and paste it into the HTML part of your blog. 

2.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice).

3. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

4. Add a link to your blog in the linky list below (it's down there somewhere). Then hop to as many other blogs as you can in search of as many wonderful words as possible!

5. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

This week's theme is:

Snow

And the word I have chosen is:

beot (plural beots)

1. A boast, threat, boastful speech

   The Thyle is thus charged with challenging any beots that he feels may not be kept by the individual making them or gainsaying a claim he believes to be false or inaccurate. — Theod Sumbel, 2008

2. boastfulness

(grabbed from Wiktionary)

AND my miraculous snow related sentence is:

As I trudged through the snow, it twinkled it's beot of coldness -- threatening me with hypothermia.

Review: Flame of Surrender by Rhiannon Paille

Kaliel and Krishani weren't meant to meet or fall in love but they did. Krishani’s dreams of death lead him to a fate he’s terrified of - becoming the next Ferryman. His only refuge is Kaliel, the peculiar girl that swims with merfolk and talks to trees. Kaliel has a secret of her own. She’s the Amethyst Flame, one of nine apocalyptic weapons. The Valtanyana will destroy everything on Avristar to get to her. Kaliel has to choose: face them, hide or unleash the Flame.

How far would you go to save everything you ever loved?

eBook, 280 pages

Received from NetGalley (first published October 6th 2011)

(summary grabbed from GoodReads)

Flame of Surrender takes place in the ethereal country of Avristar: a high fantasy world of elves.  High fantasy isn’t my normal genre, and usually I find high fantasy dry, so I tend to avoid it.  Nevertheless, I still was intrigued by the blurb about Flame of Surrender on NetGalley.  I wasn’t disappointed as the story was extremely imaginative and had great prose, but I did have some hiccups while reading.

As I said before, the world is incredibly imaginative.  The problem I had, though, was that it was sometimes hard to follow.  I thought that the author could have gone into a little more introduction about the world so it would be easier for the reader to keep what-is-what straight.  This may have been more of an issue for me particularly since I don’t normally read high fantasy, which commonly incorporates vast and elaborate lands.  At the same time, however, the reader should never feel lost and more than once was I flipping back in my e-reader to check if I had missed something (but normally I hadn’t).

As with any book labeled YA, the romance is an extremely key element.  Though I thought the romance was cute, it felt rushed.  Their initial attraction was sweet, but the build up over the time spent apart seemed… unrealistic.  The intensity of their pining for each other seemed a little much for having had such a brief meeting.  I only found it slightly annoying and not enough of an issue for me to put the book down.

The only full criticism (the other criticisms were only half) I have is that the pace is way too slow.  There seemed to be a lot of lengthy build up for elements that were not important, and it felt like nothing was happening for quite a long stretch in the beginning.  When the characters do reunite and it seemed like the story would start to pick up, it still didn’t.  I found myself losing interest as it felt the plot had barely moved since beginning the book.

Overall, Flame of Surrender was well written and set in greatly creative world.  However, it was another book that I desperately wanted to love, but found myself barely liking.

Final Thought: 15 out of 30 magical toadstools

This review is also posted on GoodReads

Featue & Follow Friday (#5)

Feature & Follow is hosted by Parajunkee of Parajunkee's View and Alison of Alison Can Read.  Each host will have their own Feature Blog and this way it’ll allow us to show off more new blogs!

Question of the Week:  Do you mind books with similar ideas to other books? Similar concepts, backgrounds, retellings or pulled-to-publish fanfic?

A: As long as the book is its own distinct work, then yes.  I think I love fairy tale retelling more than other books because they play on the fact that it is working off of something else.  I think that came out weird… what I mean is with retellings, you have those “Oic wut u did thar” moments where they incorporate the old myths and stories into another completely new story.  I love it when authors pull something from an old story and stick it into the modern world in a way that works.

With books that aren’t supposed to be a retelling and are just similar, I think as long as it’s not blaringly obvious, I don’t mind if two books are alike.  For example, I found a lot of similarities in Lauren Oliver’s Delirium to Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series.  But while reading I wasn’t put off by it -- it was more of a “Huh, I wonder if Lauren Oliver read Uglies.”

I haven’t read any pulled-to-publish fanfic that I know of, so I don’t have much of an opinion on it.

Review: Fathomless by Jackson Pearce

 Celia Reynolds is the youngest in a set of triplets and the one with the least valuable power. Anne can see the future, and Jane can see the present, but all Celia can see is the past. And the past seems so insignificant -- until Celia meets Lo.

Lo doesn't know who she is. Or who she was. Once a human, she is now almost entirely a creature of the sea -- a nymph, an ocean girl, a mermaid -- all terms too pretty for the soulless monster she knows she's becoming. Lo clings to shreds of her former self, fighting to remember her past, even as she's tempted to embrace her dark immortality.

When a handsome boy named Jude falls off a pier and into the ocean, Celia and Lo work together to rescue him from the waves. The two form a friendship, but soon they find themselves competing for Jude's affection. Lo wants more than that, though. According to the ocean girls, there's only one way for Lo to earn back her humanity. She must persuade a mortal to love her . . . and steal his soul.

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published September 4th 2012 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers 

(summary grabbed from GoodReads)

First a little backstory:

Fathomless is the third entry in Jackson Pearce's Fairytale Retellings.  What I like about this series, is that it is almost not a series.  The stories are not co-dependent on each other -- however, it would be a better experience to read them in order.  I actually read them out of order, not knowing that Sweetly was the second in the series.  What makes them a unit is that Jackson Pearce has created her own mythology that she weaves into the fairytale.  This can be somewhat jarring as most people wouldn't expect werewolves in a Hansel and Gretle retelling (which Sweetly is).  This is the reason to read them in order: Sisters Red, the first in the series and a Little Red Riding Hood retelling, introduces the mythos into a fairytale were it fits completely.  So that being said, Fathomless is a retelling of The Little Mermaid intertwined with Jackson Pearce's mythos.

Because this is the third in the series, the author wrote the book intending for the reader to know her mythos.  Therefore, it is not a spoiler to know that werewolves will be making an appearance.  I definitely found it more enjoyable to be reading and go "I wonder how she's going to do this" vs. "lolwut?  Werewolves?”

Moving on, Fathomless blows its predecessors out of the water.  It focuses on two girls: Celia and Lo.  Celia is part of a set of three, a triplet, but doesn’t really fit with her sisters.  Lo is a sea girl: a water dwelling monster part of a pack she refers to as her sisters.  The book really focuses on these ideas of sisterhood instead of centering on the romance.  Not to say there isn’t a romance, because there is (and it’s rather sweet too!). 

Fathomless does have alternating POVs, which normally drives me up the wall.  However, for the first time ever, I think the story was better because of how Jackson Pearce used this trick.  If the story had stuck to one POV, it would seriously be lacking as there was so much going on for each girl.  If it was written in third person, there wouldn’t have been the strong sense of empathy that you get from reading what the character is thinking/feeling.  Each character thought and felt things differently, which was the pivot point that took Fathomless from a good book (like Sisters Red and Sweetly) to a great book.

Mermaids were too mainstream for Lo

Therefore, Fathomless is the best in the series so far and I can’t wait to sink my teeth into Jackson Pearce’s next entry.  Eat your heart out, hipster Ariel.

Final Thought: 10 out of 10 Under-the-Sea toadstools

This review is also on GoodReads

Feature & Follow Friday (#4)

Feature & Follow is hosted by Parajunkee of Parajunkee's View and Alison of Alison Can Read.  Each host will have their own Feature Blog and this way it’ll allow us to show off more new blogs!

Question of the Week: What is a deal breaker for you in a book? For example, do you abhor love triangles? Or can’t deal with bad editing?

A: While I dislike love triangles and alternating POVs, they're not deal breakers for me.  Even if a book has bad grammar or typos, I'll still try and trudge on through it.  The only real deal breaker for me is if I've read a significant chunk of the book and nothing has happened yet.  Drives me up the wall.  If I'm bored and feel as if I'm only waiting for something to happen, more than likely I won't finish it.