This book was a really interesting take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale. Huh. I'm still sort of digesting it.
It starts when Charlotte Miller's father dies, and she is left in charge of running the mill with her younger sister. Of course, the mill/ family is cursed, and have been victim to awful luck for the past billion generations. Most of the book is taken up with Charlotte trying to keep things together and horrible accidents and whatnot getting in the way and almost ruining things. Of course, right when they're on the brink of ruin (which happens a couple different times) a mysterious stranger comes and saves the day in return for random jewelry and whatnot. Eventually it comes down to "Holy crap he wants my baby in exchange for saving the mill now um what?" and so they finally look into the history of the curse and get things sorted out. Oh, and midway through there's a nice little romance (hence having a baby for the Rumpel-type to get all grabby with).
So, I will say in its favor: I never really had any idea of what was going to happen next in this book, which is a)rare and b) especially rare in a YA fairy tale retelling, when you generally assume you know how it's going to go. However, I can't really say I loved this book. I know it was intentional and so forth, but the constant stress of "holy crap nothing will ever go right and financial shenanigans oh my gosh what are we going to do oh this dude will help but that will clearly only screw us over in the end, this really sucks I wish I were dead" kind of got to me, and made it hard to really have a good time whilst reading.
It kind of reminded me of Prison Break--as in, nothing EVER goes right and you get NO successes to carry you through to the next venture. Just failure after failure after failure. That being said, she marries a nice guy, and that's cool?
ReplyDeleteYeah--that was a very concise way of explaining EXACTLY how I felt about it.
ReplyDeleteI liked it a lot, but yeah, it took TOO long for things to happen. The writing was lovely, though, I thought.
ReplyDeleteI pretty much had to force myself to finish this one. Toooo sloooow and then later I was talking to Nikki on gchat and she said the word "mill" and I totally flinched in mental pain. Blah and blah.
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