Author: Soman Chainani
Genre: YA Fairy Tale/Fantasy
Length: 433 Pages
Release: April 2014
My Rating: 2.5/5 Stars
Review
This book was extremely frustrating for me. While I found some of the concepts about fairy tales without princes (or where princes play a different role) interesting, I didn't like how it was executed.
The story was very much a "boys" versus "girls" tale and relied heavily on stereotypes to work. While some of these are somewhat accurate, I found myself very upset with many of them and annoyed that instead of breaking the mold the author just fit his story right in with others like it. And many of the conflicts of the first novel repeat here, but are even more frustrating because the lessons that the characters learned are brushed aside and forgotten.
I also really don't like the fact that one of the girls can do all these terrible things and people hate her, while one of the boys does many of the same things but that's ok because he's a boy and they make mistakes. It was so frustrating to see how much of a double standard there was, even with Agatha, who is my favorite character.
The characters took a turn for the worse in my eyes. Agatha continues to be my favorite, but even she was more frustrating here. Sophie continues to be my least favorite. It doesn't seem like she really learned anything from the events of the first novel. Tedros was still really annoying and I didn't like a lot of the things that were done with his character. Some of the side characters were fun and stayed fairly true to form, but even so, there was nothing that really stood out to me in this installment.
Overall I found this sequel unnecessary. I will be reading the last book very soon and hope to find more of the things that I liked in the first one present in that one. Because this one fell flat, which was disappointing since it had a promising beginning.
The story was very much a "boys" versus "girls" tale and relied heavily on stereotypes to work. While some of these are somewhat accurate, I found myself very upset with many of them and annoyed that instead of breaking the mold the author just fit his story right in with others like it. And many of the conflicts of the first novel repeat here, but are even more frustrating because the lessons that the characters learned are brushed aside and forgotten.
I also really don't like the fact that one of the girls can do all these terrible things and people hate her, while one of the boys does many of the same things but that's ok because he's a boy and they make mistakes. It was so frustrating to see how much of a double standard there was, even with Agatha, who is my favorite character.
The characters took a turn for the worse in my eyes. Agatha continues to be my favorite, but even she was more frustrating here. Sophie continues to be my least favorite. It doesn't seem like she really learned anything from the events of the first novel. Tedros was still really annoying and I didn't like a lot of the things that were done with his character. Some of the side characters were fun and stayed fairly true to form, but even so, there was nothing that really stood out to me in this installment.
Overall I found this sequel unnecessary. I will be reading the last book very soon and hope to find more of the things that I liked in the first one present in that one. Because this one fell flat, which was disappointing since it had a promising beginning.
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