Crisanta Knight: Protagonist Bound by Geanna Culbertson

2.5 Stars

The premise of the book is actually a really good one.  The Fairytales we grew up with are all true and the people in them real; so real that they inhabit a land called Book where time passes differently so even the oldest heroes and heroines are still alive and kicking.  The thing is they have had children now and this is the tale of some of them - Crisa is Cinderella's daughter and her BFF is none other than Snow White's daughter and the other is Red Riding Hood's.  Stuck in boarding school and learning how to fulfil their prophecies (trust me it's all explained) they are bored with being the DID and want rather more from their lives.

Unfortunately the telling of the tale really doesn't work that well and the action is very drawn out and I did find my mind wandering off at tangents quite frequently as we go through another passage about etiquette or how miserable Crisa feels.  It is also not helped by engendering comparisons with both the Harry Potter series and the Hunger Games series and the author not being quite up to the challenge of meshing them together to produce a cohesive whole.

We have magic and potions, we have Pegasi and Dragons, we have strange premonitionary dreams, we have quests, we have full on fights and fantastical cities and buildings.  What we don't have is a real connection with any of the characters so you don't really care about how things work out.  We also don't have an editor to curb the worst of, what was to me, unnecessary waffle.  You could shave probably 100 pages from this book and still get the point across.

Most disappointingly is in an attempt to create a cliffhanger ending there is a start to the main quest but only the start.  To find out if they ever manage to get their hands on the second and third items to disable the In and Out spell over the Indexlands you will need to purchase further books.  Sadly the writing is not such that I really felt like that was going to be an option.  Whilst there are some good ideas here (The Author being responsible for their prophecies and therefore how their lives will turn out and the whole fairytale folk are real) the execution is poor and rather uninspiring.  If you can think of other books that have done something similar whilst reading then you know it can't be good.  Yes there are, purportedly, only 7 stories to be told in the whole of history but it is all in the telling and that is where this book fell down.

Sorry, but as much as I love a good fantasy/magic story this one really doesn't tick enough boxes for this reader.