Enchanted starts out so promising. A seeming retelling of “The Frog Prince” initially, I loved the opening parts of the book and the establishment of Sunday as a character who loves to write but is afraid her words will come true and so only writes what has happened. It’s an interesting concept that never fully got explored to my satisfaction, unfortunately. Grumble, too seemed a refreshing character and their early meetings and budding friendship was written beautifully by Konthis. I was willing to buy their exchanges making him human again.
But then I have to admit that I lost a bit of interest in Sunday and the Woodcutters in general. I can see what Alethea Konthis was doing in trying to open up this world to the multitude of characters that inhabit it and show the depth of fairy tale inspiration under which this family lives. I think, however, that much of this came at the expense of Sunday and her story. Generally speaking, I am quite fond of the mixing of fairy tale elements generally speaking. The early part of the book which I responded so well too was clearly planting seeds of the future stories, but then it became a bit too convoluted. All of the stories were suddenly attempting to co-exist. Did Sunday really have to suddenly also be a Cinderella character? And then gain vaguely all powerful magic (more than she already maybe had?) On the one hand, the fact that her powers were not the solution to all the problems was a refreshing shift. But on the other hand it also furthered my lack of clarity (or care?) about how she was developing as a person. It was as if once Grumble became Rumbold her trajectory seemed to stop in order to mostly be a figure who ran away as needed by the plot. That’s not to say that she doesn’t clearly have agency in her story and that for the most part she’s written in the feminist vein that we’ve come to expect modern retellings, but the focus just shifted away from her. Her magic was wrapped up in a neat little package, but not really used. She and Rumble didn’t really talk, but we only got his perspective on that mostly. There were a couple of moments, as I think back, weeks after reading where she did speak to her parents, and these I think were included and well shaped.
There wasn’t really an awareness in this world that the character’s were following pre-dictated stories in the way that, for example, Mercedes Lackey has been playing with in her Fairy Tale Kingdom books. At the same time though, there was clearly meant to be an importance to the world on stories and telling them, but it kept flickering in and out of focus.
I do actually have interest in continuing to read these books as I suspect that part of what happened is that this book became so focused on setting up a Series that the story of Sunday and Rumble may have just become less interesting as she started to expand the world. It did have the feeling that some books with intense world building have where the main characters are not nearly as interesting as the minor ones encountered along the way. (Wheel of Time I am looking at you…)
I certainly can’t say that I didn’t enjoy reading the book, or that there weren’t strong elements. There were. And I did. Perhaps it comes down to the fact that I was expecting a slightly different story, or that some of the fairy tales thrown in felt a bit forced because there were simply too many story threads making too many plots to do justice to each. As massive fairy tale retelling projects go it’s interesting to see theses pitfalls, but at the same time this book is so filled with glimmers of what could be. I have hope that an interesting series develops as each of the Woodcutter’s stories are told. Then again, given how much seems to halve already been told in this volume I worry about what is left, but I do hope to be surprised.
Now, can we talk about the blandness and lack of connection of the cover art? It was a pretty picture and maybe somewhat depicts the character described – she’s blond at least. It’s a charming princess dress. But this is a pretty painting of a bland love interest and not the active participant in her story that Konthis portrays. The next one for Saturday looks significantly more ridiculous. But it’s pretty art, I guess?
Plot -3.5/5, Character – 3/5, Thought – 4/5, Diction- 4/5, Music – 3/5, Spectacle 1/5
Overall – 3.5/5
Variegated Pixie Yarns 