Originally posted at Small Review 
 I was really expecting to love this book more than I did. It was perfectly nice and at points I really did enjoy it, but it just wasn't amazing like I was expecting it to be. 
 The integration of various fairy tales was fun and probably my favorite part of the book. The whole set up of all the different characters and their allusions to fairy tales and unique spins on those stories took up a lot of the pages and was interesting to read. 
 But, it felt more like a whole lot of description and background and not a whole lot of substance with the here and now story. I'm a reader who loves background stories, so I was mostly ok with this, but every once in a while I'd come up for air and realize I didn't have a cohesive story or characters I could really latch onto and care about. 
 There was also a kind of overdone vibe that made me feel bogged down, but I can't pinpoint what it was exactly. That's sort of strange to say because I flew through the book, but it almost felt like I was under a fairy tale spell myself, compulsively reading until I finally finished and could surface again. Usually that's a good thing, but for some reason it felt sort of suffocating. 
 I'm still interested in reading the sequel, but it's on the back burner for now. 
 Originally posted at Small Review