Gone are the days when fairy tales are censored, cleaned up, and brightened into child-friendly bedtime stories. Nobody wants to hear about innocent tales that teach good manners and not to talk to strangers anymore, now it's all about grisly realism and dark origins. It's these gritty, disturbing kind of fairy tale that is the source of our latest story. When you dabble in the world of fairy tales, sometimes they can have lasting effects. Let's see how it turns out.
Alice is the granddaughter of the allusive, mysterious Althea Proserpine, author of the fabled Tales of the Hinterland, a book with a massive cult following and near obsessive fanbase. Alice has spent her entire life on the road with her mother, Ella, running away from both Althea's reputation and the ever-present string of bad luck that follows them everywhere. It's nothing Alice can't handle until her mother disappears. Desperate to find her, Alice seeks out the one place she's always been forbidden to go...her grandmother's estate, the Hazel Wood.
First off, this book has a lot of really fun aspects to it. The atmosphere is great, the prose is strong, and there's more than enough pop-culture references to get a chuckle or two out of a reader and help us get to know what kind of person our main character is. The writing in this book is definitely strong and I appreciated that. Ms. Albert knows how to tell a story, both in a fantasy world and in the real one. The combination of gritty, curse-word ridden real world language mixed with the darker, more whimsical fantasy descriptions make this book a good balance, especially as the story travels from one world to the other. It was easy to picture and made the contrasts stand out all the more.
Now, some people might have a problem with our main character, Alice. The story tells us, right off the bat, that she has anger issues and is prone to snapping at others and being cold to just about everyone but her mother. However, I found her a little easier to deal with than other angry characters I've read about. She does feel shame when she loses her temper and does have the grace to apologize from time to time. It also helps that, later on, we discover just how this anger ties into who she is as a person. This made her feel a little more real and the anger felt like a genuine character flaw rather than a bitter person who is better for the sake of being bitter. There was a point to her being that way, so it didn't bother me that much. Plus, she had other, far more likable attributes as well. She could be properly sarcastic, witty, determined, and fearless. Overall, I liked Alice as a character, flaws and all.
This book is centered around the Tales of the Hinterland, the stories that Althea wrote about. You soon find that these stories are not just words on paper and they have a big impact on Alice's life. These are stories that are dark and violent and just the kind of thing that we like to find in fairy tales nowadays. My only problem is...we only hear two of them in this book. I feel this might have made more of an impact if we'd read the fairy tales first. You get more excited or scared or whatever if you know who you're dealing with. We're told Twice-Killed Katharine is a scary character who you should avoid at all costs but...we don't know why. I wanna hear more about the Briar King and the Skinned Maiden and all these other stories. Apparently there is another book coming up in which we finally get to hear these tales, so there's that. I just kind of wish we'd heard them first so I'd get a better idea of who I'm dealing with. That being said, the story still worked just fine and now I'm excited to get my hands on another fairy tale book (yay!).
Final Verdict
This story was very enjoyable, I liked the main character, I liked the set up, I enjoyed the writing...I had fun with it. I appreciated the care that it took in creating this universe and that, blessedly, it's a stand alone, which was nice for a change. If this sounds like the kind of thing you'd enjoy, then I'd say it's definitely worth your money at your local bookstore.
Have you read the book? What did you think? Comment below and share your thoughts. Please make sure to Follow Midnight Readings for instant updates. Have a book you'd like me to read or would like to make a recommendation? Contact me on goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/65448711-michelle-beer
Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Powerless-Shelley-Miller/dp/1543482546/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519062043&sr=8-1&keywords=powerless+by+shelley+miller
Xlibris: https://www.xlibris.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-001175242
Next Time: I can come up with some curses for this book....
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