Kathleen
27 May 2034 @ 04:57 pm
Nothing's forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.  

( Never had she danced so beautifully; the sharp knives cut her feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was far greater. )
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feeling: ecstatic
jukebox: "Sutter's Mill"-Dan Fogelberg
 
 
Kathleen
09 May 2016 @ 10:45 pm
Look the world straight in the eye, and it can do nothing to hurt you.  
My latest book reading venture took me into Winterspell by Claire Legrande. I've loved The Nutcracker as long as I can remember, so when I heard there was a retelling of it, I snapped it up as soon as a copy was available at the library and read the entire book in two days. *gasp* I'm actually reading. And enjoying it.



Summary on the back: After her mother is brutally murdered, seventeen-year-old Clara Stole is determined to find out what happened to her. Her father, a powerful man with little integrity, is a notorious New York City gang lord in the syndicate-turned-empire called Concordia. And he isn't much help. But there is something even darker than Concordia’s corruption brewing under the surface of the city, something full of vengeance and magic, like the stories Clara's godfather used to tell her when she was a little girl. Then her father is abducted and her little sister’s life is threatened, and Clara accidentally frees Nicholas from a statue that has been his prison for years. Nicholas is the rightful prince of Cane, a wintry kingdom that exists beyond the city Clara has known her whole life. When Nicholas and Clara journey together to Cane to retrieve her father, Clara encounters Anise, the queen of the faeries, who has ousted the royal family in favor of her own totalitarian, anti-human regime. Clara finds that this new world is not as foreign as she feared, but time is running out for her family, and there is only so much magic can do.

My thoughts: I adored this book. It wasn't perfect, and it had a few of the YA tropes I find annoying still lingering in the background, but the rest was so, so good I could forgive it almost anything. The world-building is an absolute delight, richly detailed, fantastically magical and layered, and filled with steampunk and clockwork imagery. I loved everything about Cane, with it's different creatures, bizarre magic, and twisted curses, contrasted against an equally strange version of 1800s New York complete with gangs and a mad doctor. And it was all fabulously dark, in that creepy, unsettling, and deliciously perfect way I yearn for in fairytales. The writing was beautiful, fast-paced, and captivating, grabbing me from the prologue and making it difficult to stop reading at any point.

Winterspell's main flaw, for me, was it's characters. There's a dizzying amount of them crammed into one book, leaving the story feeling over-stuffed and making me wish for fewer characters to spend time on, that would have fleshed them out. As it is, I wanted to see so much more character study, back stories, and flashbacks for several of the characters, like Clara's parents, while others, like Felicity, get a much smaller role than I would have preferred. Clara, despite being the protagonist, was the least interesting of the characters to me, and the few pages spent inside Nicholas's head made me wistful that he couldn't be the narrator. I'd happily read an entire sequel, prequel, or both from his point of view.

I loved the concepts taken from The Nutcracker and the unusual way they were reimagined, such as Clara's godfather, and especially the Nutcracker becoming Nicholas, a prince trapped as a statue under a curse for eighteen years, only to emerge a mixture of human and metal. I didn't mind the romance and even enjoyed some elements of it very much, especially that it lacked a dreaded love triangle to bog it down. Plus I've always sort of shipped the Nutcracker Prince and Clara so it was fun to see them reimagined within the story.

Overall, despite some flaws, I found Winterspell to be a wonderfully imaginative and unique fairytale retelling, and would happily read any future books by the writer.
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feeling: rejuvenated
jukebox: "The Wayward Wind"-Gogi Grant