Review: Red by Alyxandra Harvey

Red by Alyxandra Harvey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This review is long overdue. With medical crises and what is now my new life, my reading had been pushed to the wayside and I finally am picking up and getting my reviews out. My profuse apologies to Entangled Teen and the author for being so late when you so graciously granted me a review copy!

With that being said, now to the review. This deserves every single gold star I can give it. Let's start with the cover. I'm not a complete cover junkie, but I have to admit that covers can lure me in. This cover is stunning in its simplicity and totally drew me in, making me want to read.

But that cover is nothing to the story inside.

Loosely, you can consider this a re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood. This is a fairy tale re-telling turned on its ear, made supernatural, and written in such a manner that you're gonna be guessing for most of the story.

I don't want to give away a single thing, so I will leave this review by saying: Ms Harvey...I hope you write more in this world. This was my introduction to your work and now I have to go add more of your books to my TBR.



View all my reviews

{Blog Tour} SHADOWS ON SNOW by Starla Huchton -- with review, giveaway, and excerpt, oh my!

{Blog Tour} VAMPIRE LIES, Blood and Snow Season 2 Volume 1, by Rashelle Workman -- with giveaway and review

Catch the rest of the tour by clicking on the banner ^^^^

{Book Review} INSANITY by Cameron Jace

Book Title: INSANITY
Author: Cameron Jace
Publisher: author
Publishing Date: December 2013
Length: 254 pages
Source: purchased
Book Blurb
After accidentally killing everyone in her class, Alice Wonder is now a patient in the Radcliffe Lunatic Asylum. No one doubts her insanity. Only a hookah-smoking professor believes otherwise; that he can prove her sanity by decoding Lewis Carroll's paintings, photographs, and find Wonderland's real whereabouts. Professor Caterpillar persuades the asylum that Alice can save lives and catch the wonderland monsters now reincarnated in modern day criminals. In order to do so, Alice leads a double life: an Oxford university student by day, a mad girl in an asylum by night. The line between sanity and insanity thins when she meets Jack Diamond, an arrogant college student who believes that nonsense is an actual science.

Goodreads | Amazon

I bought this book because of the cover and because I wanted to read Cameron Jace's retellings. (I still haven't gotten around to reading them all. I suck. Sigh.) When #COYER (Clean Out Your E-Reader, run by my blogging friends Berls and Michelle (Fantasy is More Fun and Because Reading is Better than Real Life)) had a readathon weekend of fairy tale re-tellings, I knew this was a perfect time to take out INSANITY! =D I had plans for two other books, but life got in the way.

The Alice in this story was kidnapped at seven and fell down the rabbit hole. But she no longer remembers any of that thanks to the asylum's electro-therapy. She learns she has been in the asylum for two years, having been committed after she killed her schoolmates, including her boyfriend Adam J Dixon. When we meet Alice, she is planning her escape, and yet ruins it by going back for her Tiger Lily flower. She is caught by her sadistic, unsympathetic guards - a nurse and a guard, who take great pleasure in her electro-therapy the next session. But Pillar the Killer, another inmate, has different plans for Alice. Pillar swears she is the Alice and needs her to help stop the Cheshire Cat.

Alice in Wonderland was never my favorite growing up. I don't know why it wasn't when I adored other fantasy tales, but something always grated my nerves about the book. So imagine my surprise at the incredible enjoyment I got from reading this twisted tale! I thought Cameron Jace's tale was interesting, held my attention, made me question if this is all in her head or if it's truly happening, redefined the idea of sanity and insanity, and made me eager for more. I look forward to reading the next book and hopefully having more of Alice's past, both recent and in Wonderland, exposed to the reader. 

{COYER Summer Vacation} Read-a-thon Weekend!

I'm putting together my reading list for this weekend. I normally never do lists, but I love Fairy Tales and wanted to participate in this weekend's Read-A-Thon for COYER's Summer Vacation!

So the books I have in mind are: 

• Insanity by Cameron Jace (Alice in Wonderland based)
• Pentimento by Cameron Jace (Beauty and the Beast based)
• Kingdom Collection by Marie Hall (Alice, B&theB, Little Red Riding Hood)

What are you going to read?! Click the image above to be taken to the linky and join us on this COYER readathon!

{Book Review} CRUEL BEAUTY by Rosamund Hodge

Cruel Beauty

By Rosamund Hodge

Published: January 28, 2014

Publisher: Balzer & Bray, a Harper Collins Imprint

Length: 342 pages

Source: Owned

Synopsis:

Based on the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Cruel Beauty is a dazzling love story about our deepest desires and their power to change our destiny.

Since birth, Nyx has been betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom-all because of a foolish bargain struck by her father. And since birth, she has been in training to kill him.

With no choice but to fulfill her duty, Nyx resents her family for never trying to save her and hates herself for wanting to escape her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, Nyx abandons everything she's ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, destroy his enchanted castle, and break the nine-hundred-year-old curse he put on her people.

But Ignifex is not at all what Nyx expected. The strangely charming lord beguiles her, and his castle-a shifting maze of magical rooms-enthralls her.

As Nyx searches for a way to free her homeland by uncovering Ignifex's secrets, she finds herself unwillingly drawn to him. Even if she could bring herself to love her sworn enemy, how can she refuse her duty to kill him? With time running out, Nyx must decide what is more important: the future of her kingdom, or the man she was never supposed to love.

GOODREADS | AMAZON

{Book Blitz} PENTIMENTO by Cameron Jace -- with giveaway

Pentimento by Cameron Jace
Publication date: December 20th, 2013
Genres: Paranormal, Post-Apocalyptic, Young Adult

{Book Review} DARK ANGEL by T.J. Bennett

DARK ANGEL - A Gothic Fairy Tale
by T.J. Bennett
Publisher: Entangled Edge
Published: October 21, 2013
Edition: ARC
Source: Publisher for an honest review

When young widow Catherine Briton is washed ashore, the sole survivor of a violent shipwreck, all she wants is to go home to London. But injured as she is, she can’t escape when a shadowy stranger rescues her and takes her to his castle—where she’s healed with suspicious, almost magical speed.

The more time Catherine spends in the castle, the more her curiosity rises where her fiercely handsome new "master," Gerard, is concerned. As she begins to investigate, though, her discoveries only bring more questions. It seems Gerard isn't the only one on the island keeping secrets…

The small town is full of strange mysteries and townspeople who know more than they should about her. And when a hulking beast that stalks the nearby hills and valleys catches up to her, Catherine must figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.

 Have I told you yet how much I love Beauty & the Beast? My first encounter with Beauty & the Beast was NOT the Disney movie. It was from the collection of fairy tales my dad would read to me every night as a child. And then, I discovered Robin McKinley's "Beauty" when I was in middle school, an excellent re-telling that captured me with not only the story, but the Beast's magical library that held all the books ever published and even those which have yet to be published. And since then, I've enjoyed many twists on the tale, including this one by T.J. Bennett!

I immediately liked the feisty, plucky heroine as she stands up to a man in a time when women just did not do that. When she washes ashore and is the lone survivor of the shipwreck, you can feel her panic as she looks for her purse, holding all the money she has in the world for her cause.

Gerard is devilishly handsome and appealing, but lacking manners as he is used to just demanding and getting his way. He has that tortured soul thing going for him that enchants nearly every woman; why we all go for that, I have no idea but we do!

I thoroughly enjoyed this suspenseful, gothic tale of Beauty & the Beast. As always, the scariest monster/beast out there is mankind as opposed to animal kind. As Catherine discovers the sad truth about the island and the islanders, she and her newfound friends are threatened by one of their own. What lurks in the shadows may not be a beast at all! Restrained passion given the time (1859) and slow building romance was appropriate and delicious to read, and when they finally come together it's a tumultuous experience.

T.J. Bennett's writing was spot-on for the time period and despite the setting, made me think very much of Wuthering Heights. Well-written and weaving intrigue and suspense, it gets its hooks into you as you read, pulling you further in. I love it when a book does that!

Happily Ever After? What do you think? :)