Tag: family

YA

Review: Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George

Andge @ Down the Rabbit Hole

Series: The Princesses of Westfalin Trilogy #1

princess of the midnight ball -jessica day george A tale of twelve princesses doomed to dance until dawn…

Galen is a young soldier returning from war; Rose is one of twelve princesses condemned to dance each night for the King Under Stone. Together Galen and Rose will search for a way to break the curse that forces the princesses to dance at the midnight balls. All they need is one invisibility cloak, a black wool chain knit with enchanted silver needles, and that most critical ingredient of all—true love—to conquer their foes in the dark halls below. But malevolent forces are working against them above ground as well, and as cruel as the King Under Stone has seemed, his wrath is mere irritation compared to the evil that awaits Galen and Rose in the brighter world above.

Captivating from start to finish, Jessica Day George’s take on the Grimms’ tale The Twelve Dancing Princesses demonstrates yet again her mastery at spinning something entirely fresh out of a story you thought you knew.

 

2.5 Drink Me Potions

If you know me well enough, you would know that I absolutely adore fairy tale retellings in general. However, something about Princess of the Midnight Ball just lacked in excitement.

Overall, this novel was a fun enough read while it lasted, but it’s easily forgettable.

The story is based off of one of the Grimm’s brothers fairy tales. This wasn’t one of those famous ones remade by Disney. It did give off a bit of a creepy vibe so I suppose Disney would have to change it up a bit. Anyway, it starts off with the evil villain. Some dude named the King Under Stone. Like, what the heck? I don’t know the fairy tale so it may have made tons of sense but it just seemed like a lame name for such a powerful villain. So what if he lived underground? Doesn’t make it right to give him such a stupid name.

There were 12 girls, all sisters and princesses of the kingdom, who lived under a curse of having to dance a Midnight ball every third night. For the evil villain himself. Of course, no one could know of this except the fact that they kept disappearing to who-knows-where in the middle of the night from their rooms, no matter how hard their father king tried to prevent them.

Enter Galen Werner, just an ordinary soldier boy coming home from a war that was over in the kingdom. He was a likeable character. He seemed to follow some sort of moral code. Maybe it came from seeing the sights he did in war that not many other young people his age did. He wasn’t jaded though, but gave off a trustworthy vibe, a you can count on me kind of feeling.

Of course, turns out that he really was the kind of guy who would sacrifice his own safety to help 12 princesses for their sake.

There’s a bit of romance in it between Galen and the eldest princess, Rose. Not by much for YA standards. It was an innocent first bloom kind of love, with glimpses from afar and the occasional conversation in the garden. It was still nice, I guess. Just…not the kind of thing to get your heart racing for them.

But all these things I mentioned above? Lackluster. That’s the best word I can come up with. There’s not much emotion beyond a slight oh hey, that’s cool, I guess kinda feeling. Things were predictable, it was just a matter of how they got there. Although there wasn’t much, here are the few things that I found unique and somewhat memorable:

1. All the girls were named after flowers. (I know, right? That’s also hard to keep track of with so many of them)
2. The lair of the evil villain reminded me of the Underworld, but described with water instead of fire.
And lastly,
3. Galen’s adventures with his invisibility cloak. (Harry Potter, anyone? Hmm?)

Princess of the Midnight Ball is not a bad fairy tale retelling, but may just be memorable for the younger YA audience. If I had read this a few years earlier, maybe my rating would have changed. Who knows? But as of right now, this story will probably fade from my memory amongst the many, many books I’ve read. It’s just missing that extra umph.

Overall Recommendation:
Princess of the Midnight Ball was a retelling of an unfamiliar fairy tale. This could’ve made it more intriguing and mysterious since I had no prior knowledge of how the story may go, but the story was still fairly predictable from the start. The characters were okay, especially our hero Galen who fits the knight in shining armor stereotype to a T, but no one stuck out as unique. The romance was innocent and cute and that’s not bad, but that doesn’t even give the story a little extra excitement that it clearly needed. Overall, it was decent, but it’s no competition amidst the rather large genre of fairy tale retellings in YA these days.

adult

Review: Orchard Valley Grooms by Debbie Macomber

Andge @ Down the Rabbit Hole

Series: Orchard Valley #1-2

orchard valley grooms -debbie macomberValerie rushes home to Orchard Valley, Oregon, when her father, David, suffers a heart attack. She and her two younger sisters, Stephanie and Norah, are gathering at his side, praying he’ll live, fearing he’ll die.

At a time like this, falling in love is the last thing on Valerie’s mind. And with Dr. Colby Winston, of all people! He’s David’s heart surgeon, a renowned specialist who enjoys small-town living, while Valerie is a high-powered businesswoman who prefers city life. They’re complete opposites in every way. Yet David keeps insisting she and Colby are a perfect couple.

Meanwhile Stephanie has other worries besides her father’s health. She’d fled Orchard Valley three years earlier after her humiliating rejection by local journalist Charles Tomaselli. Now she’s home, and it’s not long before they begin reliving past battles–and renewing old feelings. He was the reason she left. This time, will he give her a reason to stay? David seems to think so.

Does their father know something Valerie and Stephanie don’t?

3 Drink Me Potions

It’s a fairly open secret that I have some strange soft spot for Debbie Macomber. Yes, her stories can be cheesy with their happy-ever-after endings, but sometimes, a girl just needs those kinds of endings, you know?

With Orchard Valley Grooms, I had such high hopes. Two sisters falling in love with their respective special someones? Sounds like it fits the criteria to a glove.

But. Yes, there is a but. These two stories captured me with their endless drama and irritated me to no end all at the same time.

In Valerie, the immediate attraction and way Colby and Valerie fell for each other made some sense in a way. Valerie was under a lot of stress what with her father suffering from a heart attack. Colby was there to give her the emotional support that she needed. However, by the end of it, they were happily in love and thinking of marriage in, what, three weeks? Does this happen in real life? How can one know if this person would survive every bump in the road that’s sure to come in hopefully a long marriage? Sure, it may be an adventure to find out, but still. It was a little unsettling to see that it happened all so quickly.

And then there’s the fact of their drama that initially prevented them from getting together after realizing each others’ feelings. Colby is traditional as crap! Don’t mind my language. A women can very well work and take care of a family. Yes, he’s tired at nights after his long (and presumably emotion-taxing) shifts, but a woman doesn’t just live to serve hand and foot for him when he gets home. As for Valerie, I understood her inhibitions but she wasn’t all for compromise initially either.

If that first story wasn’t exhausting enough, I immediately jumped into Stephanie. Silly me thought it would help relieve my inner frustrations. Oh boy, was I wrong.

I liked Steffie more than Valerie in a sense that I could understand unrequited love. She ran away from the face of rejection and I don’t blame her. Charles was awful when she admitted her feelings three years prior. Who could blame a girl for wanting to get away from such embarrassment?

However, the resolution to Charles’ actions just didn’t seem quite…right with me. It wasn’t that it couldn’t have been plausible. It could have been. I just didn’t understand why wait so long to tell Steffie he felt the same way. So much drama and heart ache could’ve easily been bypassed if he did. Why get so angry if he knew she still felt the same way towards him? I just dunno. This poor heart of mine couldn’t handle all this nonsensical heart ache.

Anyway, I gobbled these stories up as fast as I could and although I didn’t love them as I had hoped, they weren’t terrible. A guilty pleasure, if you will. But never have I wanted to throttle guys as much as I did with these men. I can fully understand the Bloomfield sisters’ feelings.

Overall Recommendation:
Two stories in one with each based on one Bloomfield sister. I couldn’t ask for more, can I? Turns out, the story didn’t hold as much for me as I had hoped. In both Valerie and Stephanie, the male protagonists acted in nonsensical manners that drove me (and the Bloomfield sisters) crazy. I suppose there had to be tension and drama to prevent an immediate happily-ever-after resolution, but it was exhausting. I wouldn’t necessarily throw these stories out. It was still the cheesy, happy ending kind of story that I needed on occasion. At least it fills up that requirement perfectly. I would say it’s perfect if that is the kinda book you’re looking for on a boring, lazy afternoon.

YA

Review: Spinning Starlight by R.C. Lewis

Andge @ Down the Rabbit Hole

spinning starlight -R.C. lewisSixteen-year-old heiress and paparazzi darling Liddi Jantzen hates the spotlight. But as the only daughter in the most powerful tech family in the galaxy, it’s hard to escape it. So when a group of men show up at her house uninvited, she assumes it’s just the usual media-grubs. That is, until shots are fired.

Liddi escapes, only to be pulled into an interplanetary conspiracy more complex than she ever could have imagined. Her older brothers have been caught as well, trapped in the conduits between the planets. And when their captor implants a device in Liddi’s vocal cords to monitor her speech, their lives are in her hands: One word and her brothers are dead.

Desperate to save her family from a desolate future, Liddi travels to another world, where she meets the one person who might have the skills to help her bring her eight brothers home-a handsome dignitary named Tiav. But without her voice, Liddi must use every bit of her strength and wit to convince Tiav that her mission is true. With the tenuous balance of the planets deeply intertwined with her brothers’ survival, just how much is Liddi willing to sacrifice to bring them back?

Haunting and mesmerizing, this retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans strings the heart of the classic with a stunning, imaginative world as a star-crossed family fights for survival in this companion to Stitching Snow.

4 Drink Me Potions

Thank you to Netgalley and Disney Book Group for this copy in exchange for an honest review

**Spinning Starlight comes out on October 6, 2015**

Can I first just say that I absolutely adored this book? Oh, and that TITLE along with the cover? Just. Gorgeous.

For an adaptation and fairy tale retelling of a story that’s not as famous as some others, Lewis did a fantastic – no, a SPECTACULAR – job of spinning out Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans in her own way. And going into this, I had not read her previous novel, Stitching Snow, but I think I may have to after seeing the remarkable way she spins a tale. (Yes, I’m really going all out with the word spin here.)

Liddi initially impressed me as some spoiled girl who lived in the spotlight because her family’s big and rich in this interplanetary kingdom. She went to parties, had media following her around everywhere and a house (with a talking operating system as her friend) to herself. But that was just initially, which lasted all of maybe ten seconds. It was immediately apparent that she was none of these things. She hated the paparazzi. She never asked for the attention that came with being born into the Jantzen family, and there was so much pressure to live up to that name and the glory of each and every single one of her 8 big brothers.

Now, the tech speak and the physics of things went beyond me. That’s not my specialty. At all. But the feeling of isolation and the need to create something technological to impress the world WAS understandable. Lewis didn’t immediately make it clear what this world was exactly. It was maybe revealed in the odd sentence here and there. For example, the world is called Seven Points. What’s that supposed to mean? Okay, 7 planets as each individual points? That makes sense. Wait, what are they each called? What is the one she’s on? Is there something special about each one?

Okay, the answers slowly piled in but it took a while to understand it. There was no information dump at all, which is a blessing and curse at the same time. It took more effort on my part to get into the story in the beginning when I was confused with half of what was going on and the terminology that was being thrown around. So maybe a little information dump, more like an information pile, would have been appreciated. That’s my only complaint.

From there, danger dropped onto Liddi and the story unfolded a little slow. Who was the bad guy? Where were her brothers? If you knew of The Wild Swans, you’re just waiting for the pieces to start falling together.

But the wait was worth it. Once Liddi lost her voice and the whole evil plot involving her brothers was laid out, it was better than I thought it could be. A surprising twist there, new characters there, it took me on a wild ride indeed. It was absolutely genius in mixing this tale with sci-fi aspects like portal travelling and being trapped in a hyperdimensional state, not fully in the physical world but not fully out of it either.

Lewis put her own mark on Andersen’s basic plot and really made it her own. I want to say so much more about plot things, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise of just what they are so that limits it.

What I will say is that I didn’t think it was possible to enjoy a book that contained more descriptive writing than dialogue. It wasn’t possible for that if Liddi couldn’t speak. We were just constantly in her head, reading her thoughts and her emotions. The anxieties of time limiting her and the constant fear for her brothers’ safety. Her memories and flashbacks to her past when more of her brothers lived at home with her and when her parents were still alive. There was so much GOOD content and it was written well. It had to be or else all these monologues would just get beyond tiring. It’s an easy trap to fall into and I can’t stress enough how well Lewis did to keep me interested.

And the relationships. Oh my, the feels! There was so much love for her brothers, each and every one of them. It was clear she would do absolutely ANYTHING for them. Come on, there are EIGHT brothers. That’s a lot of people to love, but the flashbacks really helped us understand their relationship with her and how much they all loved and wanted to protect their baby sister, no matter what. There was also a romantic sort of love as well, which didn’t get my heart racing as much as other books may, but it was the sweet kind of love that is reminiscent and suiting for fairy tales. So I’m definitely not complaining.

The ending was not what I expected, but that’s not to say it wasn’t good either. And it was summed up in a quote that I must put down here, which is a testament of how relateable Liddi’s character can be to anyone who reads Spinning Starlight.

“Some journeys can only be made once. Some partings aren’t what they seem. Some endings must be so something else can begin.”

And with that thought hanging on the mind, so did the story end as well.

Overall Recommendation:
Spinning Starlight was a beautifully written prose and modern adaptation of The Wild Swans. With a protagonist who was mute, the writing did centre more on the inner monologue in Liddi’s head than dialogue with others, but that in itself was done so well that it didn’t feel like it dragged the story. It enhanced it. Mixing the old fairy tale with new sci-fi elements and tech speak, it may get confusing in the beginning but I definitely recommend you check out this clever and gorgeous retelling for yourself. I don’t think it would disappoint.