An Unfortunate Fairy Tale

For someone who reads paranormal non-stop, you’d think nothing would faze me when it comes to the stories in books… NOT SO.  What honestly never ceases to amaze me is how many times I have this exact same internal dialog while reading a new book—it goes like this:  “Wow, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever read!  Wait.  I always think that when reading a new book.  Yea, but this one really is weird.” (I obviously have short-term memory loss as well, right?)

Once again I have had those exact thoughts.  This time about An Unfortunate Fairy Tale Series.  Don’t get me wrong, these books are good… just really different!  They are about this girl named Wilhemina Grime who, thankfully, goes by Mina but unfortunately for her, she finds out in book 1 that when she was a baby her mother changed her last name from Grimm to Grime in order to hide her from the curse of the Grimms… first brought on by her great (however many times over) grandfather who was one of the Brothers Grimm.      

Mina is cursed to live through and must complete each of the tales thrown at her by “The Story” an ancient living book of fairy tales.  If she refuses either she will die or The Story will choose her sweet little mute brother to start throwing into stories.  You might think, being that this started with the Brothers Grimm, all the tales are ones we have heard before, but this is not always the case.  Many are completely new and the ones we know don’t always look like what we expect.  For example, we see Snow White, but it’s mixed in with Sleeping Beauty.  What I found most fascinating is that Mina’s role is not always that of the heroine (at one point she even plays the villain – but I won’t tell you which one).

All in all, I found these books extremely enjoyable despite how weird they are.  And they are even clean enough that I handed one to my daughter to read… unfortunately she couldn’t get over the fact that the main character likes pop tarts and refused to read past the first chapter.  Her loss.