Review: Hero

Title: Hero
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

Book Summary from Goodreads:

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.

Review: Enchanted

Title: Enchanted
Series: Books of Arilland, Book 1
Author: Alethea Kontis
Publish Date: May 8, 2012
Publisher: Harcourt Children's Books
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Reworked Fairy Tale
Started Reading: February 12, 2016
Finished Reading: February 18, 2016

 Book Summary from Goodreads:

It isn't easy being 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?

My Two Cents:

Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars (I loved it)

I'm a big fan of re-written fairy tales, it's one of my favourite genres. I originally read this book as part of a challenge so I read it quick and didn't retain much of anything in regards to the plot or characters. I noticed it on my read list and couldn't for the life of me remember how the book went.

Normally this would be a bad sign for the book, but in this case, it was a sign of a bad reader who was reading for a deadline and not for enjoyment.

I know when I first read this I didn't realize that it was part of a series, so finding out that there was more to read, I decided to start back at the beginning and read this again. I am so very glad I did.

This is a wonderful book that I didn't give enough time our first time around. The story is so sweet, and the relationship between the main characters, while very quick to build, was handled quite well and was much more believable than normally found in normal fairy tales.

The way that Alethea Kontis merged the stories of The Princess and the Frog with Cinderella is almost seamless. It works surprisingly well to the point that it feels that these tales should have been combined ages ago.

Some of the side plots seemed to come out of nowhere, and the explanations were a bit vague, but I would guess that there will be more explanation for them in further books. I'm looking forward to finding out more about this family.

To Sum Up: This book was just as good the second time around! I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the series. This is a beautiful mash up of a bunch of fairy tales and is very well written!