random on-page extremely violent animal death; misleading marketing that implies the romance involves the fairy godmother or openly queer main charactrandom on-page extremely violent animal death; misleading marketing that implies the romance involves the fairy godmother or openly queer main characters, which it absolutely does not. why was the language not edited to exclude phrases like “as much as she was incensed, she was also nervous�?...more
not funny, not romantic, not imaginative. no tension, no suspense, no chemistry, no energy, no stakes. reading this is the next best thing to taking anot funny, not romantic, not imaginative. no tension, no suspense, no chemistry, no energy, no stakes. reading this is the next best thing to taking a nap.
if we're told the heist is impossible to pull off and should require a year to prep for, don't show the planning and execution of the heist easily fit into five days.
if we're told the plot hinges on art history and knowledge of art, mention a few artists who aren't THE MOST famous and well-known artists in the world.
if we're told there is magic, put in .... magic? one guy's "magic skill" is finding objects he's been told about if he's close enough to them. um.
any "romance" is the absence of romance. this doesn't belong in the romance section. this is so, so unfun and uninteresting....more
I love fairy tales and retellings and intrigue and cons so I *really* should have liked this book more. It just isn't....very good, and it doesn't reaI love fairy tales and retellings and intrigue and cons so I *really* should have liked this book more. It just isn't....very good, and it doesn't really have any of these things that I love in it.
1. The whole story takes place after Cinderella's happy ending, which is cool—except not only do we have to painstakingly go through pretty much the whole story *before* the happy ending, getting the "con" and plot explained over and over again, but the original Cinderella story doesn't really have anything to do with the plot of *this* story. Ash is a commoner inside the castle; that's kind of it. Nothing about the Cinderella story *specifically* matters here: this could have happened after Beauty and the Beast, and the stepmother is Belle's scheming dad. It could have happened after Sleeping Beauty, and the stepmother is the thirteenth fairy. Not a lot about the con or the plot of this novel would change. Cinderella is here here as an aesthetic, a set dressing, not a real part of the plot; so it's not really a retelling or a sequel, it's a marketing ploy. This aggravates me.
2. This is one of those stories where we're repeatedly told that the protagonist is smart, skilled, and resourceful, but all her decisions are stupid or predictable. We never see Ash being smart in practice; we're told she's a good actor even though she's constantly (constantly!) slipping up and saying/doing things she shouldn't have, then blinking innocently to allay suspicion. She doesn't do any real scheming or strategizing on her own. She takes orders from her stepmother and her grandmother and carries out the tasks they give her; any time she does take an action of her own, it's almost instantly stymied by someone else. Then, (view spoiler)[she spends a few days looking at paperwork and somehow comes up with a solution to a problem that's been around for a decade plus, then girlbosses her way into convincing the king to implement it. The solution is also really, really fucked up: it's making the citizens of a military-occupied, violently subdued country pay for their own land in order to live on it. This is only a "solution" for a really, really minuscule understanding of politics, nation, etc etc. It was gross, not good. (hide spoiler)] Also, Ash gives up her primary motivation very quickly when her love interest is threatened. This is never really dealt with or confronted at all: we're supposed to think it's fine that she no longer wants to do the thing she's wanted to do her whole life because there's a Man there. Uh.
3. The girlboss is real here. There are a couple out of place, gender studies major interjections that I think are supposed to show that Ash is actually smart and capable ("she's not grieving quietly enough for you?") which read extremely oddly in the context of a not very feminist fairy tale, in a not very feminist novel—Ash has to maintain the sweet blinking innocent persona and she doesn't like it, but that's about all the engagement with gender or power we get. And I was a gender studies major, but this is a fairy tale in an explicitly sexist society; the book doesn't confront or interrogate power at all, so having Ash shout Twitter distillations of feminism is weird.
3. The happy ending hinges on (view spoiler)[inviting the evil villain to the palace and . . . . . . . . getting her so mad she spills the whole story, in the throne room, so she can get comfily arrested? I...what? This supersmart strategist and plotter just does a full first-person crimes reveal to a person she knows is her enemy, again, inside the throne room of the palace, because she just couldn't dissemble? (hide spoiler)] That's such a lazy, implausible, forced ending it makes it VERY clear the writer really didn't know how to get her characters out of the pickle they'd gotten themselves into and chose the most obvious, laziest way out.
4. The love interest's name is Rance. What? This is an unbelievably bad name for the LOVE INTEREST. This is the name of an evil duke AT BEST. 4a. The love interest's dog's name is "Puppy." I think this is supposed to be cute.
5. The early sex scenes are uncomfortable and awful to read because Ash is uncomfortable and having an awful time. They're well done because they convey how bad the sex is. The later sex scenes that are supposed to be good, though, gave me the exact same icky feeling—I don't know if it's the language, the coyness around naming body parts, the incredibly forced argument immediately beforehand that is obviously a copy-paste of an argument that used to be in a different place in the novel but got shoved in here because "they used to be enemies!" or what, but they were *painful* to read. Clumsy, unsexy, extremely and transparently pandering to romantasy trends. Come on now.
6. Speaking of aesthetics. What the hell is the world of this novel? The men wear suits and ties, the women wear giant gowns all the time. They play cards and drink brandy, but there are apparently no books. They have running water but no watches. They have FACTORIES to manufacture magic, but apparently no other industry. There are warring countries, but that doesn't make for "intrigue" especially when we know so little about any of the countries including the one the book is set in. This doesn't feel like a fairy tale world OR a historical era; there are no real details to anchor it in any particular place, real or imagined; it's a jumble without taste or truth.
7. The writing......this book over-explains everything, all the time. When someone shouts, you don't need to explain that the character flinches "in shock at the volume." You can just say they flinched, we KNOW what it's referring to. This is specifically aggravating to me here because it makes the book much, much longer—there are paragraphs upon paragraphs of repeated information, so many phrases and clarifications that anyone with a pulse wouldn't need when reading a book. The writing is also full, FULL of cliches—sometimes three or four in one sentence—and I'm sorry, fairy tale characters should not be saying the phrase "clarifying questions." These cliches don't save time; they often add extra words (you could just say QUESTION) and bring the tone of the writing down several notches. It's a pity because in a lot of ways the writing is good, but there is too much of it.
This book could be 100 pages shorter and it would be better for it....more
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