Bewitching [Hardcover]

Alex Flinn doesn't disappoint with another one of her unique interpretations. Bewitching is an exciting start to a promising new series combining the chronicles of a beloved character's past and future adventures along with the modernized fairy tales Flinn fans have come to love.

The mysterious and magically mischievous Kendra steps out of the Beastly shadows and into the spotlight.

At least sort of. The main story line mostly involves Emma and her newly acquired stepsister Lisette. Emma's a total daddy's girl but Lisette isn't the sweet lovable new addition she pretends to be. Lovely Lisette is slowly stealing away everything Emma holds dear, and when she finally goes too far Emma enlists the help of a certain teenage witch.

But Kendra knows all too well that spells very often backfire. There's always a flaw in every plan. Emma needs to be mindful of what she truely wants.

The patent pending Flinn spin is in full tilt throughout Bewitching giving plenty of classics like Hansel and Gretal, The Little Mermaid, and Cinderella a fresh fictional face. Bewitching started out as a coming of age story about Kendra and her family, and seemed to drag a little. I became more interested in Kendra's current project Emma and Lisette. At times I wanted to skip the flashbacks and get back to the main story line but just went with the author's desired flow. I found the broken up story kind of stop and go, but once you get over the red light green light structure of the story lines, you find the layout makes sense and every plot enjoyable.

Bewitching is layered like a black and white cookie aligning the lighter and darker parts of Kendra's life side by side giving readers a complete picture of the flawed character. Little vignettes of past exploits depicting Kendra's magical mishaps were fun and interesting ways of interpreting history with fairy tales. Flinn paints her heroine as a good witch who isn't exactly good at being a witch, since her best intentions usually go awry with ill and unforeseen consequences. But by the end I don't see Kendra as being bad at her craft. I think the linchpin of a successful spell isn't dependent on the caster but by the person it's meant to help, because ultimately they chose the outcome of the spell.

Curl up in a cozy corner and prepare yourself for an extended stay because Bewitching is the kind of book you'll want to keep reading and finish with a smile on your face.

First Impressions: I was thrilled to find out I would be receiving Bewitching for review! I am a HUGE Alex Flinn fan and I love pretty much everything that she writes especially Cloaked and Beastly. Needless to say, I was dying to sink into this book and get lost in yet another wonderful creation from this author. I think that Alex is one of the best authors out right now when it comes to retelling fairy tales and I was excited to see what she would do with The Little Mermaid and Cinderella, which were promised to be in this book.

****Spoiler Alert!*****

First 50 Pages: I thought that the first couple of chapters started out a bit slow for my liking, but it quickly picked up with its pace. We start the book by learning about how Kendra first realized that she had magical powers and how her powers were able to improve. The setting is during the Black Plague and her entire family has passed away, with the exception of her little brother, Charlie. Charlie is about the die and Kendra is desperate to save him, so she seeks the help of the town witch, Lucinda. Lucinda has around fled town for fear of being hanged as the witch who brought the Plague to their town. Kendra goes into Lucinda's garden and a crow appears guiding her to the right herbs to save her brother.

When Kendra arrives back at home, she somehow knows the right magical words to save her brother and what to do with the herbs. The next morning, Charlie no longer has the plague and they are forced to flee their home for fear of rebuttal from the remaining townspeople.

When Kendra and Charlie leave in search of a new village, they are tired and go to bed hungry and alone. When they wake up, there is a smell of gingerbread in the air, and Kendra spots a house made of gingerbread not far from where they had slept. Kendra thought that she somehow made the house appear as food for her and Charlie, but a witch shows up and catches them eating her house. This is obviously a play on the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, and the witch even cooks children into her gingerbread fence posts. Kendra tries to play nice with the witch, and she is the one who teaches Kendra everything she knows. When the timing is right, Kendra and Charlie devise a plan to escape from the witch, and Charlie ends up pushing the witch into her own oven which kills her. Soon after, the townspeople come and "kill" Kendra by hanging her, but she doesn't die because the only way a witch can be killed is by fire. Charlie has fled and Kendra never sees him again.

Plot: All of this happens within a few chapters and I think it moved a bit too quickly. I would have liked more detail on Kendra's time with the witch and more background on Kendra and how her powers grew. After the Hansel and Gretel remix, the rest of the story bounces between present day Kendra introducing other events that she has had a hand in creating, and stories told by other characters. For instance, a large majority of the book is a retelling of Cinderella, but is told from the stepsister's point of view and it is set in modern day Miami. Kendra throws in her two-cents here and there, but it is mostly Emma (the step-sister) who is telling the story. I guess I was expecting this book to be more about Kendra and it kind of felt like a bunch of fairytale short-stories with Kendra as the narrator for in between. However, even though that was kind of disappointing, I really, really, loved the stories that were included in this book.

My favorite hands down was the retelling of Cinderella. I loved what Alex Flinn did with the story and how she made it entirely her own. The same goes for The Princess and the Pea and The Little Mermaid. I won't give any more spoilers about these because they were honestly the best parts of this book. The author definitely shines once the stories start to roll in and the rest of the book was a breeze to read and very not-boring at all.

Final Thoughts: I think this one is at the top of my favorite books written by Alex Flinn. It was really entertaining and it was nice to find out some more information about my favorite Beastly character. This is a must-read for any fan of the author and for people who enjoy fairy tales. It was magical and I had a difficult time putting it back down once I got through the first couple of chapters. I can't wait to find out what Alex tackles next!

Review Courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales

Quick & Dirty: This first installment of the Kendra Chronicles has some interesting, if unsatisfying, retellings of classic fairy tales.

Opening Sentence: If you read fairy tales, and who doesn't, you might believe there are witches all over the place-witches baking children into gingerbread, making princesses sleep for hundreds of years, even turning normal boys into hideous beasts to teach them a lesson.

The Review:

Mis-marketing might be the biggest problem with this book. After reading the synopsis you might think this story is going to be about Kendra, the badass witch we've met in Alex Flinn's other books. After the first 45 pages, it's not. It becomes a montage of Kendra's other curses and spells gone wrong. Some of them are pretty funny, if not clever, but with the exception of Lisette and Emma's story nothing was very engaging. We weren't given enough time to like the characters, much less care about them. I think the series is supposed to be more about Kendra's life, with little snippets provided in each book. Personally, I don't like it. I don't really like Kendra in this, and though it's supposedly her story, she's not the main character. After the short story about her beginnings as a witch at the start of the story, we really only get paragraphs from her perspective.

Hansel and Gretel transforms into Kendra's own story, but other's featured are Little Mermaid, Princess and the Pea, and most prominently Cinderella. Lisette and Emma's Cinderella story is broken up between Kendra's retelling of her other fairy tale mishaps. Except here, Kendra epically fails at playing fairy godmother-to Emma, the step-sister. Both girls are in high school, and Emma's lived with her step-father since she was three. Lisette's mother just died, and her father takes her in. He's really sweet, loves Emma like she was his own, but is very excited to have Lisette living with them. Emma's excited to-at first. She's always wanted a sister, she's never really had a best friend. Emma is a great narrator for this upside-down fairy tale. She's quirky, loving, wants to see the best in people, and she's really smart.

Kendra, on the other hand, is not a character you end up feeling sympathetic towards, though Flinn certainly tried. She's just a snarky centuries old witch who chooses to relive high school and meddle in other people's lives-no matter how horrendously her previous exploits have gone. She's funny and insightful, but she's also vengeful and a little stupid-not a good combination. But as I said, she's not the main character; she's just retelling all her exploits to the reader.

The conversation of this book really kept it moving for me, because honestly everything else was a little blah or rage inducing. The blah factor comes in because we don't get a chance to like the characters. I really liked Beastly, Flinn's Beauty and the Beast book, and would probably have liked her retellings of these stories if they had been less two-dimensional, if she had more pages to develop the characters. The Little Mermaid retelling happens post-Titanic sinking chaos, which was so cool, until she reached the end of Doria's story and I wanted to strangle something or someone. There was nothing technically wrong with it, which my grammar-oriented self appreciated greatly. It's the narrative format that makes it easy to read, and I did like Emma a lot because she sounded like the kind of girl I'd have been friends with in high school.

This brings me to how this book made me feel, which was horrendous. The theme throughout the novel was "If you don't have a boy, your life isn't worth anything." I wish I could say I was exaggerating. The only character who isn't portrayed as pathetic without a boyfriend is Kendra-who is described as pathetically lonely. So while this book fulfills the characteristics of a romance, it is horrendously degrading to teenage girls. It was a really easy read, and it was a relatively short book, but even the fairy tale aspect-which I usually adore-isn't enough to make me recommend this book.

This Kendra Chronicles Series:

1. Bewitching

FTC Advisory: Harper Teen provided me with a copy of Bewitching. No goody bags, sponsorships, "material connections," or bribes were exchanged for my review.

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