Series: Books of Arilland, Book 2
Author: Alethea Kontis
Publish Date: Oct 1, 2013
Publisher: Harcourt Books
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Reworked Fairy Tale
Started Reading: February 20, 2016
Finished Reading: February 26, 2016
Rough and tumble Saturday Woodcutter thinks she's the only one of her sisters without any magic—until the day she accidentally conjures an ocean in the backyard. With her sword in tow, Saturday sets sail on a pirate ship, only to find herself kidnapped and whisked off to the top of the world. Is Saturday powerful enough to kill the mountain witch who holds her captive and save the world from sure destruction? And, as she wonders grumpily, "Did romance have to be part of the adventure?" As in Enchanted, readers will revel in the fragments of fairy tales that embellish this action-packed story of adventure and, yes, romance.
My Two Cents:
Goodreads Rating: 3 Stars (It was ok)
This review has taken me a bit to figure out. I enjoyed the book, but I found it quite slow when compared to Enchanted. I wasn't sure why I had such a struggle with it, because as a sequel, it's set up similarly to Scarlet.
First there are new characters to meet, as well as already known characters to follow up with. There are parts where you see what's going on with different sets of characters at the same time. These were all well written when compared to Scarlet, but it didn't catch my interest as much.
After pondering it for a while, I came to realize that it was due to who was being written about when in the book. In Scarlet, we start off, and stick with, the new characters for a while. In Hero, we get a quick glimpse at our new characters, and then go back to ones we know for a number of chapters. This really seemed to slow down the start of the book, because the new characters had a big question mark and I wanted to know more about them before we went back to Saturday and what she was doing.
I also think that this book may have been trying to keep tabs on too many characters while trying to keep focus on the main plot at the same time. It's along the same line that I mentioned in the first book's review where things seemed to get muddled a bit with too many side plots. This is probably to try and keep the overall arc of the series moving, but I felt it gave more questions than answers.
This book didn't have so many recognizable fairy tales mixed in, or the fairy tales used as inspiration were obscure. It felt more like an original plot than Enchanted. The tropes, however, were very present and were turned on their head in some instances. I quite enjoyed how these were employed, and it's part of what made the second half of the book so fun.
The ending tied up the primary plot nicely, while leaving a small amount open for the sequel I will be continuing with this series, and look forward to the continued mash up of fairy tales, I just hope that the next book has a bit more of the magic that was in Enchanted.
To Sum Up: This book was decent and I enjoyed it, but compared to Enchanted I felt it was quite slow to start and lagged in the first half. The writing was fabulous and the mix up of fairy tale tropes is well done. I look forward to the next book in the series.
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