First reaction: much better than book 1. Second reaction: a lot like book 1 really. Scarlet is book 2 of the Lunar Chronicles series, and this installment is patterned supposedly on Little Red Riding Hood. The connection to Cinderella in Cinder was quite a bit more recognizable in terms of plot and character than the fairy tale connection is here. Maybe that’s why this one is a little better, especially in terms of character because ti doesn’t have to rely on the requirements of the […]
FFS WHYYYYYYYYY
Who’s ready for some kvetching? Plot-wise, all you really need to know is that Heartless is the origin story of the Queen of Hearts, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. So although you know how it’s going to end, here is a general SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this review, because I don’t want to dance around the details of what bugged me. The very biggest problem is that the heroine, Catherine Pinkteron, is an absolute mess of a character. To a certain extent, […]
Anna Should Be So Lucky
The Raven and the Reindeer is Ursual Vernon’s (under her ‘grown-up book author’ pen-name of T. Kingfisher) retelling of The Snow Queen. It’s fantastic, bloody, and dark without loosing the magic that is fairy tales. Vernon has a kind of no-nonsense, logic based method to her storytelling that appeals strongly to me. She also manages to incorporate animals in a way that makes perfect sense for those animal types, her raven feels very raven-y and her reindeer are very reindeer-y, yet still makes them unique […]
A Constellation of Tales
Though the title makes it sound like it’s a collection of new stories, The Starlit Woods is a collection of re-told fairy tales. I had a different perception going into the book, though being a fan of retold fairy tales I didn’t mind that the stories were retellings and not completely original stories. This is a really good collection of stories and while there were a couple I wasn’t fond of, most were very compelling. I decided to check this book out because the list […]