Torn picks up right where Switched left off. Wendy Everly has just found out that she is the heir to the throne of Förening, a Trylle (troll) enclave Torn picks up right where Switched left off. Wendy Everly has just found out that she is the heir to the throne of Förening, a Trylle (troll) enclave in Minnesota, hidden from human eyes unless those humans are taken there, or invited in.
Angry with her mother, cold Queen Elora, for imposing tough restrictions on her—including driving away Finn, her bodyguard/boyfriend of a few days—Wendy runs away, as seventeen-year-olds often do. She brings along Rhys, the human boy with whom she was switched at birth. She convinces herself that her main goal in this endeavor is to introduce her adopted brother, Matt, to Rhys, his long-lost biological sibling. But getting away from her mom and the stifling rules of the Trylle Court is definitely part of it.
The three kids have scarcely met up when they are kidnapped by the Vittra, a rival nation of trolls. Oren, king of the Vittra, cares nothing for the two human boys in his dungeon, but has a particular interest in Wendy. (view spoiler)[He is the ex-husband of Elora and Wendy’s father (hide spoiler)].
Much as Wendy dislikes her mom and Trylle society, she finds them marginally more palatable than (view spoiler)[her apparent father and his minions (hide spoiler)], and she has no intention of cooperating with him. She does, however, find a motherly/big sister figure in Sara, Oren’s much younger, kinder wife. And she feels a peculiar connection with Loki, an irrepressible Vittra tracker/guard who treats her well while Oren holds her and her adoptive brothers prisoner.
Soon Finn and his colleague Duncan arrive to rescue the three captives, and they successfully escape, helped by Loki for unclear reasons…
Back in Förening, Tove, the Trylle boy with the great psychokinetic powers, resumes training Wendy in her own power of Jedi mind tricks persuasion. She accidentally causes a lot of minor damage through sloppy use of persuasion and sees the necessity of fine-tuning her talent.
Meanwhile, Finn continues to be cold and distant, which frustrates Wendy to no end. Doesn’t he remember all their stolen kisses and fervent glances? He says he does, but Duty Comes First. He can’t risk messing up Elora’s plans for the future of the royal line. Thus, he refuses to be more than civil to Wendy, even though it tortures her.
Back in Vittra-land, Oren is pretty annoyed that his powerful daughter escaped, and Loki contrives to go after her alone. He claims that he’ll convince her to return to her father’s palace, but what is this rascal really after?
Content Advisory Violence: A lot of punching and kicking and combatants flying through windows. Little blood shown. Pretty much the same as the last time around.
Sex: The raciest material in here is Wendy’s occasional recollection of her makeout session with Finn towards the end of the previous book. They start snogging again at the very end of this installment, but are interrupted by his father. Wendy and Rhys stumble on (view spoiler)[Matt and Willa canoodling on a bed; the two older kids are quite embarrassed to be caught in this situation.
Wendy also gets kissed by Loki, who feels that the two of them are bound by destiny. He wants her to run away with him, but she refuses, confused by all the sudden changes in her life (hide spoiler)].
The Chancellor continues to be an old perv who thinks creepy thoughts about Wendy and various other women young enough to be his granddaughter, much to the disgust of Tove, who can hear his thoughts.
Language: One or two uses of “sh**” and some minor cuss words. No F-bombs this time.
Substance Abuse: Everybody lightly imbibes champagne at Trylle festivities. Rhys and Wendy are too young to legally drink, but they are under adult supervision on these occasions, so I’m not sure if it’s all that problematic.
Nightmare Fuel: The hobgoblins are kind of gross and ugly, although nothing we haven’t already seen in Labyrinth or the Spiderwick Chronicles. What makes them nightmare fuel is the fact that two human-looking Vittra can conceive such a monstrosity.
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Conclusions The Trylle trilogy has a goofy-sounding title, and the books themselves have so far been, well, goofy. That said, this series is a lot more pleasant than other examples of paranormal YA from the same era.
Why is this so? Because the melodrama in this is a lot less intense than many of its contemporaries. It’s not constantly squawking about the end of the world (which never arrives, because sequels and money) like the Maximum Ride series. It’s not swollen and baroque and using every fantasy creature but the kitchen sink, like the Mortal Instruments.
And while there remains some definite overlap with Twilight, the “love triangle” here isn’t all that much of a love triangle.
Finn’s feelings for Wendy are really just hormones, and he can easily cut himself off from her without any visible pain. Loki, meanwhile, is earnest and full of hope. He likes her not just for her looks, but for some strange affinity he senses between the two of them. He’s a sap, but he’s sincere enough to sell it.
I actually like Loki. Unlike Finn, he has an actual personality—snarky, flirtatious, kind of stupid but surprisingly brave, in case you were wondering—and his chemistry with Wendy doesn’t feel nearly as forced. During book one, I found Finn tolerable but boring. When Loki showed up, I wondered if Finn was necessary for the story at all. He almost disappears about halfway through this book and only flares up again at the end.
Wendy's still an idiot. She hasn't listened to the Beatles in years and doesn't like chocolate, all of which makes me seriously question her sanity. But by the end of this book, she has decided to put her angst on hold and go through with something uncomfortable to help out her future queendom. Good job, Wendy.
The young supporting cast—Matt, Willa, Tove, Rhys, and even Duncan—are all actually rather likeable.
Queen Elora turned out to be a more complex, interesting, and empathetic character once her backstory is told.
Oren so far is a pretty one-dimensional villain, but I thought Elora was one-dimensional in Switched, so he too might improve upon closer acquaintance.
Some people have made fun of the world of this series, populated as it is with beautiful trolls. But there is actual precedent for that in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore. Some of their trolls were monstrous and brutish, like the three who harass Thorin & Co. in The Hobbit, but others were humanoid and fair and crafty like the folk in these stories.
For a much better YA treatment of these creatures, see East by Edith Pattou.
So far, the Trylle series is definitely silly, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s fast-paced and enjoyable over all. I’m curious to see how it all ends. ...more
Switched begins with a flashback. Our narrator, a seventeen-year-old named Wendy Everly, tells us the occasion that she first became aware that she waSwitched begins with a flashback. Our narrator, a seventeen-year-old named Wendy Everly, tells us the occasion that she first became aware that she was a “monster.” She was six years old and throwing a tantrum at her own perfectly nice birthday party. But we can’t quite dismiss little Wendy as nothing but a brat, because her father died very shortly before her birthday.
Wendy storms back to the kitchen to yell at her mother for buying her a chocolate cake when Mommy knows full well that Wendy doesn’t like chocolate—this is the reader’s first major clue that something’s wrong with Wendy. For this, the spoiled child deserves perhaps to be sent to bed early, lose dessert privileges, or get bopped on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.
But no, Wendy’s mother declares that the little girl is a monster and no offspring of hers. She stabs at Wendy erratically with a large knife, and probably would have killed her had not eleven-year-old Matt, her biological son, stepped in just there. As is, Wendy has a giant scar on her stomach that will stay forever.
Fast-forward eleven years. Matt and Wendy live with their aunt Maggie, their mother having been institutionalized shortly after the knife incident. Matt has done all right for himself, but Wendy has bombed out of several public schools, and has a rep for being sullen, difficult and rather stupid, all of which is true.
There’s a boy in one of Wendy’s classes who stares at her. He has black hair and pale skin and beautiful dark eyes, and his name is Finn. On the day our story begins, Wendy decides to ask him why he stares. “Everyone stares at you,” he replies with no visible emotion. “You’re very attractive.” He’s a lot like every other sulky, leather-jacket-wearing, late 2000s paranormal YA love interest, but unlike Edward Cullen or Jace Wayland, Finn just spits it right out. Credit where credit is due.
Why is he named Finn, though? A guy named Finn is almost always a wholesome character. He’s supposed to be a farm boy who shelters fugitive princesses and wears the sweaters his momma knitted for him, or a former Stormtrooper with a heart full of empathy for Resistance pilots, scavenger orphans, mechanics, and space goats. Same goes for a lad named Ben, James, Sam, or Will. The emotionally-unavailable bad boy with a hidden heart of gold archetype is more likely to be named something like Nick or Jack.
Finn also tells Wendy that he’s noticed her ability to think something at someone and make them change their mind. She has always been able to do this—say, she looks at an angry teacher and thinks “You aren’t going to send me to the principal” and the teacher, a bit befuddled, sits down and tells her “You don’t have to go to the principal’s office.” Sometimes she wonders if this is what her mom meant about her being a monster. At any rate, it frightens her that Finn (or anyone, for that matter) knows of this talent of hers.
She uses this talent to persuade Matt, who knows better and is very worried, to drive her to the asylum for an audience with their mom. Wendy interrogates the woman but comes away with little she didn’t already know. Her mother raves that Wendy, as a baby, somehow disposed of Michael, the mother’s biological second son, and substituted herself. Matt dismisses this as the ranting of a lunatic but his sister thinks there might be some truth to it.
Wendy goes to the school dance for the first time ever, solely to talk with Finn some more, but he says something callous, she becomes enraged, and she hurriedly leaves before he can explain. Good thing he just decided to climb through her bedroom window and explain it to her anyway. This is one of a few spots where the book treads a little too close to Twilight, although given the changeling theme, it could also be a nod to Peter Pan (our heroine’s name is Wendy, after all) or Labyrinth (albeit Jareth is much, much cooler than Finn).
Did I say changeling? Turns out that Wendy is not only adopted, she’s not even technically human. She belongs to a race of creatures from Norse folklore called the Trylle—known to humans as trolls, but not to be confused with the monsters that live under bridges and/or eat jellied Dwarves.
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Nope, these trolls—er, Trylle—look human enough, although they’re prettier than most of us and might have a green undertone to their skin.
The Trylle culture is dying out. For the past several generations they have swapped their royal/high-ranking babies with human infants, so the Trylle babies can acquire wealth and education while in human society, then bring at least some of that back to their true people once they return. Finn is a Tracker, a low-ranking Trylle whose job is to find adolescent changelings and bring them home. And Wendy is the only daughter of the Trylle Queen, the inexorable Elora.
Finn wants Wendy to come to the hidden Trylle stronghold in Minnesota with him, but she hedges, thinking of the worry she’d cause her aunt and especially her brother. Then she gets attacked by a rival band of Trylle, called the Vittra, and realizes she endangers her human family if she stays…
Content Advisory Violence: Stylized, action-movie style fights between the Trylle and the Vittra. Very little actual weaponry used. Lots of punching and flying through windows. No gorier than the average Rick Riordan book.
Sex: Finn and Wendy make out a few times, despite not knowing each other well at all. The night before he has to leave the settlement, he spends snuggling in bed with her—snuggling is all they do. Before that, she suspected that her mother had a creepy, Mrs. Robinson-like relationship with him; in reality, (view spoiler)[Elora had been in love with Finn’s father and had some sort of maternal feeling for him, which she squelched as soon as she realized he liked her daughter and was a threat to the Trylle aristocracy. (hide spoiler)] Elora is currently having an affair with a Trylle lord, the father of one of Wendy’s new friends, which is thankfully not shown in any detail.
Rhys invites Wendy to join him for a Lord of the Rings marathon and she falls asleep on his couch. Finn gets there and assumes the absolute worst, despite a lack of any real evidence.
Language: There’s one F-bomb and a variety of less pungent four-letter words in here.
Substance Abuse: Social champagne drinking, including by the underage and very awkward Wendy.
Nightmare Fuel: Nothing.
Politics and Religion: Nothing.
Conclusion Switched is definitely part of the post-Twilight paranormal trend: awkward brown-haired heroine, sulky love interest with no concept of personal space, glamorous hidden society in some rural part of America….too much melodrama for a story that just started and characters we barely know, and prose that veers from fine to patchy.
This paperback edition includes four bonus chapters called “The Vittra Attack.” The publisher labels this a short story but it isn’t—it has no arc of its own and is hard to follow until you finally see where it connects to the main body of the story. These four chapters are from the POV of a Vittra named Loki, whom I assure you I was not picturing as Tom Hiddleston with long black hair.
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Ahem. Loki drives the getaway car for the two Vittra who tried to capture Wendy. He gets pushed around by the Vittra king, but is close to their queen, for some reason. Loki is never shown or mentioned in the book proper, so I don’t know why Hocking considered him important enough for his own bonus chapters. At any rate, the book would have been improved if his chapters were woven into the main book—it would have added at least some sense of urgency.
It’s silly, fast-paced, not terribly deep, and enjoyable enough that I’ll probably read the second book. It’s a good deal better than the aforementioned Twilight Saga or the Mortal Instruments series, but not nearly as much fun as the Percy Jackson books.
If you want a melodramatic YA urban fantasy trilogy that’s actually mostly good, though, check out A.G. Howard’s Splintered trilogy. It has one very annoying major character, but the prose and worldbuilding are solid. ...more
Books like The Perilous Gard remind me of why I love to read.
Our story begins in England, summer of 1558, in an unpleasant castle where Princess ElizaBooks like The Perilous Gard remind me of why I love to read.
Our story begins in England, summer of 1558, in an unpleasant castle where Princess Elizabeth Tudor keeps a small retinue, ever watched and harassed by her angry half-sister, Queen Mary. I knew right away that I was in good hands because Elizabeth Marie Pope conveys deftly that Mary bullied Elizabeth without making the older royal out to be a one-dimensional monster.
One of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, a stupid beauty named Alicia Sutton, writes an angry letter to Queen Mary complaining of the conditions at Hatfield. Mary is infuriated by the letter, but believes Alicia too sweet and witless a creature to have composed it herself, so the royal punishment falls instead on the head of Katherine, Alicia’s plain-looking and plain-spoken older sister.
Princess Elizabeth has no choice but to send her friend Katherine to the place “suggested” by the Queen: Sir Geoffrey Heron’s desolate manor, Elvenwood Hall, sometimes called the Perilous Gard. Elizabeth promises to retrieve Katherine as soon as she has the power, but that doesn’t seem likely in the foreseeable future…
Kate soon discovers a number of things awry at the house in the spooky Elvenwood. Her host, Sir Geoffrey, is the picture of chivalry to her, but won’t even acknowledge his younger brother, the troubled and handsome Christopher. Sir Geoffrey’s little daughter is missing or dead, and everyone has a different story regarding what became of her. Master John, the steward of the house, is keeping secrets from the household he serves. The poor folk in the nearby village live in a constant state of servile dread, and it is not the family of the castle that frightens them. And rumors swirl of a malevolent race, human-like but not human, who live in a labyrinth below the ancient town well and are responsible for all manner of dark deeds in the neighborhood…
Pope’s writing is meticulous, and this novel does not leave a single thread of its tapestry dangling. Every detail becomes important by the end.
The world-building is so thorough that you might feel a wave of homesickness for the Gard once you put the book down.
The characters, particularly Kate and Christopher, are lovable and flawed and full of life. (view spoiler)[Pope creates a great deal of tension between those two, even though there’s a notable lack of sensual description. They don’t kiss until the very last page—and even then, it’s implied—but the dialogues between them sparkle, with the true meanings of their words concealed. They are now one of my OTPs and I’m only sorry I didn’t meet them earlier. (hide spoiler)]
The themes of the story are rich, and I didn’t expect many of them going in. (view spoiler)[There are questions here about paganism versus Christianity in British history, and whether or not magic can real or smoke and mirrors. (hide spoiler)] All this is built into an enthralling historical fantasy that surges to a perfect climax and a eucatastrophic ending.
In short, if you loved any of the following:
The ballad of Tam Lin Cupid and Psyche Yeats’ "Stolen Child" The Witch of Blackbird Pond The Silver Chair The Dark is Rising series Labyrinth The Queen’s Thief series Crown Duel and Court Duel Wildwood Dancing or Shadowfell The Spiderwick Chronicles
The kingdom of Arilland is so marinated in magic that archetypal fairytale events are common enough that people can identify them when they happen.
TheThe kingdom of Arilland is so marinated in magic that archetypal fairytale events are common enough that people can identify them when they happen.
The King of this place has occupied the throne for so long that no one can remember, let alone write down, his name. Yet he’s not only youthful, but handsome and vibrant. What’s his secret?
The King looks about the same age as his son, Rumbold, who’s a wild child. Usually the boy can be found among pirates, huntsmen, groupies, and his two besties, Erik the redheaded guardsman and Velius the dark, half-fey mage. But no one has seen Prince Rumbold in a year. He’s been sick or locked up or on vacation or something, no one really knows.
Also missing is the notorious Jack Woodcutter, Jr. He’s ostensibly the captain of the royal guard, but he finds plenty of time for slaying monsters, breaking into harems, and generally causing an impressive amount of chaos. The people of Arilland sang so many songs, and told so many tales, about fearless, crazy Jack. Where has he gone?
Jack’s parents produced both a folk hero and a princess, but for reasons best known to themselves, they still live in a dilapidated sylvan farmhouse with their remaining children, even though either Jack or Monday should really have bought them a nice little estate by now. Let me introduce them to you, since the book thinks all of them are Very, Very Important:
The Woodcutter Family JACK, SR: is a simple man who has a talent for storytelling, but mostly just cuts wood and marvels at all the trouble his children get into.
SEVEN: Jack Sr.’s wife, who’s very grumpy and materialistic and the last person you would ever imagine was related to the fairies, so of course two of them are her sisters.
JACK, JR
MONDAY: She married a prince—apparently not a son of the king, since Rumbold appears to be an only child—and moved far away.
TUESDAY: She died after dancing in a cursed pair of shoes.
WEDNESDAY: The eldest child remaining at home, though we are never told exactly how old she (or anyone other than Sunday) is. She spends her days moping in her chamber, and only speaks in pretentious fragments, which are either outtakes from Doors lyrics or unused bits of John Green dialogue.
THURSDAY: The feisty sister who eloped with the Pirate King! I’m curious how she met him, since the Woodcutters don’t live anywhere near the ocean and Jack is the only one who travels at all.
PETER: He’s an artist or a wizard or…something, the book really doesn’t care. He might have had one line in the entire book.
TRIX: an adopted faerie child who turned up on the doorstep one day. No one knows how old he really is, or how old he’d be in human years, and his maturity is impossible to gauge. Trix will outlive the rest of his family, probably by hundreds of years.
FRIDAY: the nice sister who’s really nice and sews and knits and is really nice and is nice and stuff. The book is so busy telling us over and over again how kind she is that we never actually get to see her do anything particularly kind.
SATURDAY: the tall, scruffy sister who’s great with an axe, but sees everything as a piece of wood in need of chopping.
SUNDAY: the youngest, a little twerp who loves to write and is easily bamboozled.
It is Sunday, alas, who is stuck as our protagonist. Her humdrum life becomes interesting when a friendly enchanted frog becomes interested in her writing…
Content Advisory Violence: We see a sailor getting flogged in a (very confusing) flashback. Rioters get branded on their arms. Someone gets their throat cut. A fairy slices open the stomach of a goose, to release the person who was magicked into the goose. The goose somehow survives this and is sewn up by Friday, good as new. More under Nightmare Fuel.
Sex: It’s implied that Rumbold slept with half the kingdom before his curse took effect, although to its credit, the book neither judges him, nor condones his reckless behavior. At one point his memories manifest as bubbles, one showing a nude female figure for a second before it pops. There’s a Noodle Incident mentioned where Jack busts into a Sultan’s harem. Wednesday is naked when she regains her true form and collapses in Velius’ waiting arms.
Language: If there was any, I missed it.
Substance Abuse: Velius and Rumbold both get sloshed a few times.
Nightmare Fuel: (view spoiler)[The King preserves his youth by turning his current wife into a goose, butchering and eating the goose, and sewing her shadow to his, not necessarily in that order. But Wednesday is so powerful that the King only needs to consumer her shadow to turn into a giant.
Rumbold’s mom’s spirit can’t move on to the afterlife for reasons unclear. (hide spoiler)]
Politics and Religion: This universe is run by a lot of shady, unseen gods with unpredictable whims.
Sufficient Excuse for Being There In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” the grandfather of all nitpicky reviews, Mark Twain lays out a few rules for novelists to follow. Here are a few of them:
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others…
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there…
I’ve never read any of James Fenimore Cooper’s work (The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans are both on my TBR) so I can’t say if Twain’s criticisms were justified regarding their original target. But my goodness, do they ever apply to whatever Enchanted was.
When Twain spoke of “corpses”, I think that was just his sarcastic way of noting characters who lack pep. But Kontis’ character roster is so overcrowded and under-explained that sometimes I could not tell the literal corpses from the survivors. It was nigh impossible to remember which of the Woodcutter kids was dead, which was just presumed dead, which married a prince and which married a pirate. Their adventures could fill several novels but are all crammed into the first fifty pages of this one as info-dumping. The book then expects us to have emotional reactions to characters we’ve only heard about, never actually met.
The physically present characters don’t have much more depth than their dead or absent compatriots.
Take Sunday, who starts out a goofy sixteen-going-on-seven-year-old who has learned nothing from her family’s past, abruptly becomes this aloof, guarded person halfway through, then changes back again for no discernable reason. Her innocence itself seems hokey after a while, rather like the parody Disney princess played by Amy Adams in the film Enchanted (2007, no connection to this book). It’s like Kontis herself doesn’t really believe in Sunday, and because our author doesn’t, we can’t either.
Rumbold is no better. The book can’t decide if it wants a wholesome prince or a dark, beastly one. So we wind up with this patchwork fellow, who’s supposed to be Mr. Rochester but comes off about as suave and Byronic as Napoleon Dynamite.
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We learn from flashbacks that he was a soldier, a playboy, and a pirate—all before he turned eighteen!—but none of that has any effect on who he is today. The book spends a lot of time on his backstory, even though it’s irrelevant, far-fetched, and insanely convoluted.
Third in (ir)relevance is Trix. Everything about this character, from his little-boy hyperactivity to his very name, screams “Look at me! I’m cute and whimsical!” He’s an adult trapped in a kid’s body, except when the book forgets and makes him a kid trapped in an adult’s body. He doesn’t comprehend the trouble he causes and probably never will, and he’s going to live forever. Centuries from now, someone will find him prowling the ruins of the (booby-trapped) farmhouse, talking to himself and inhaling junk food like Kevin at the beginning of Home Alone.
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For characters like this who really are lovable, see the fairies in Lisa Mantchev’s Eyes Like Stars . I’d love to go adventuring with those rascals, but I wouldn’t turn my back on Trix Woodcutter.
Mama Woodcutter is dumb even by this book’s standards. The unseen gods keep sending her gift horses and she looks them in the mouth every. Single. Time. You’d think she’d learn after she accidentally cursed Tuesday to dance until her heart failed, but nope. She holds Rumbold (who was a child at the time) responsible for what happened to Jack, but turns into Mrs. Bennet as soon as the King notices Wednesday. Hurrah for consistency.
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Don’t get me started on Joy and Sorrow. Joy spends the first half of the book doing nothing and the second half doing everything, a nearly literal dea ex machina.
Sorrow is scary as a villain should be, but her behavior doesn’t make sense. If she’s been in love with the King and keeping him alive all these centuries, why didn’t she just whisk him off to Faerie long ago? They could have spent the past five hundred years frolicking in the woods without any bizarre occult rituals involving geese and disembodied shadows. I get that there’s probably a law or something against human/fairy marriage in this world, but the book never confirms that. I still liked Joy and Sadness better in Inside Out.
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The King is actually a very good villain, even though I found his acts of blood magic a bit over-the-top, even for this genre. His bloodlust was hinted at early on, his motive (longing for eternal youth) was tried and true, and the plotline about his name being lost to history was poignant. Good job with him, Ms. Kontis.
Papa Woodcutter is a sweetheart, a simple man in awe of his absurdly powerful children. I liked him.
Peter Woodcutter is negative space. It’s teased that he might become a powerful magician—but boy magicians are a dime a dozen these days. The poor lad is given no qualities to make him stand out. i think he probably winds up being important in a sequel, but in order to care about his future, the author must make us care about him in the present. Peter still wound up being one of my favorite characters in this—by process of elimination. By doing nothing, he’s much less offensive than sappy Sunday, creepy Trix, or aggressively stupid Rumbold.
Friday is a discount Beth March, and she would have been really likeable had the book given her any room to breathe. Her fellow characters sing her praises, but all we readers know about her is that she’s a magician with a needle and thread.
Princess Monday is only there to make sure there are seven Woodcutter sisters. Literally all she does is look pretty.
On the other hand, it’s hard not to like Saturday. She’s the only member of the family with no magical gift, which she makes up for with a commendable work ethic. She’s also the only one who doesn’t look like a Barbie doll—she’s pretty, but taller and brawnier than the average girl, and maintains a practical wardrobe. She’s fearless in public and vulnerable among her family. She has no patience for all the zany magic around her, and believes that every problem can be solved if you hit it hard enough with an axe. Jo March spliced with Gimli. How is she not the main character?
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Saturday enjoys friendship and chemistry with Erik, the magnificent guardsman with the shining red hair and arid sense of humor. Erik, alone among the characters, seems to realize that he’s trapped in a story—and a very silly one at that. Sometimes he almost breaks the fourth wall. He’s a much better friend than Rumbold deserves. The book would have been much more bearable if he’d been in more of it.
Wednesday is pompous, but smarter than she lets on, and highly entertaining. I was genuinely worried about her once she caught the King’s eye. She deserved a bigger role than she was given.
My favorite character is Velius, the dashing half-fae gothic heartthrob of the royal court. Loyal to his friends, a biting wit and a vicious flirt, tall and lithe and black-haired and usually inebriated, he reminded me a bit of Hawkeye Pierce. Although if this book were an (intentional) comedy, it’s more Wayne’s World than M*A*S*H: Velius is a much cooler Wayne, Erik is a much cooler Garth, and Rumbold is Phil, the guy who’s always hammered but still remembers every lyric to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” That’s the tragedy of Velius. He steals every scene he’s in, and a sense of hidden depths follows him through the story. He could be the next Morpheus of Wonderland, and he’s stuck in this role:
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How to Fix This Book 1. Get rid of everyone except Saturday, Erik, Wednesday, Velius, Peter, Friday, Jack Senior, the King, and Sorrow. Saturday is now the MC.
2. Don’t cram in every fairytale that ever existed.
3. Give the poor sisters real names instead of this days-of-the-week scheme, which is cute at first but gets annoying. Let’s christen Saturday Tamara, Friday Hannah, and Wednesday Sophia for now.
4. The two pairings (Saturday/Erik and Velius/Wednesday) are teased, but this is mostly a family-and-friendship story. Not everything has to have romance front and center. Save it for the sequel!
5. Velius becomes king since Rumbold doesn’t exist.
6. Make the final battle a bit less trippy.
7. A less generic title is in order. The Axe-maiden of Arillland is catchy.
Conclusions I’ve been on a roll with rereading books I used to dislike or DNF’d—and The Demon King, Eyes Like Stars, and Entwined were all much better than I remembered. Unfortunately, my dismal first impression of Enchanted was pretty much correct.
There are a lot of elements in this book that would usually work...
The girl who writes down her daydreams and brings them to life.
The evil, vampiric king locked in a twisted affair of mutually assured destruction with his paranormal mistress.
The oblivious mother who keeps accidentally cursing her own children.
The reformed playboy.
The creepy changeling.
The girl with the axe.
The quiet wizard brother, hovering, waiting for his own shining hour.
The darkly powerful young woman and the equally isolated young wizard who’s drawn to her.
Pick any four of these and you’d have a fine yarn. Cram them into your book’s outline like archetypal sardines and you have a tangled mess of a story.
This book is salvageable, but not recommended as is, unless you like giving yourself a headache, trying to follow a story where everything happens and none of it matters.
BETTER CHOICES: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier
The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale
Entwined by Heather Dixon Wallwork
Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George
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