The Witch's Tower by Tamara Grantham

I usually enjoy a good twist on a Faery Tale but somehow this one just fell consistently short of the mark for me.  It may not have been helped by the fact that the story of Rapunzel was never one of my favourites or it may just have been that it seemed to be based on the more sanitised version of the tale peddled by Disney (Tangled is an awesome movie though!).

Somehow I never felt a sense of the world that Gothel and Rapunzel existed in.  It was all too fractured and disparate with no real meat on the bones of the places.  There are forests and desert lands and even icy mountains to contend with but they don't come alive in your imagination as you read, they remain on the page.  This may be because little description is given to them - this can help your imagination spark and create the lands for yourself or it can leave you feeling that you have no knowledge of the place our characters inhabit.  Unfortunately, for this reader, I found it to be the latter.

We then have a range of characters that we are introduced to.  Gothel who is guarding Rapunzel as penance for her mother's curse that put her in the tower.  Raj who was the Princes' squire, the Prince who is now trapped under the same spell in the tower because his heart is not pure enough to save Rapunzel.  Together they must go on a quest to get the one thing that cut Rapunzel's hair and so break the spell.  As is the nature of quests they will somehow manage to draw together a motley band who help them - in this case a dwarf cursed to shape shift to a wolf (yes, THAT dwarf - we all know his name even if he doesn't), a dark elf who plays a fine lute but would rather get drunk and a mysterious maiden who becomes a fire breathing dragon thanks to a curse.

You know, writing it all out like that makes it sound quite fun and enjoyable.

Sadly, it really wasn't.  I never got to really know the characters as they all seem two dimensional at best.  Gothel in particular drove me to distraction and as the bulk of the book is about her and told from her perspective you can see the problem.

Strangely, this is one case where I think a few more pages would have benefitted the story.  Give it more room to breathe, more room to help the reader picture the exotic fairyland locales  It would have also allowed the motley crew to have a little more camp fire downtime on their quest and so given them the chance to get a personality going on the page.  Instead of they were here and then they were at this stop on their journey and then they sleep under the stars and then they are here.  It really is moving from one set piece to another.

By the time they got to the Ice Mountains and we finally meet Gothel's evil aunts I will admit I was just reading to finish the book.  There are no real surprises to be found in the ending either - everything falls in to place as you expected it to from the start.  Not necessarily a bad thing but unfortunately the getting there was, and I don't like saying this, boring.

Not one for me, which is a real shame as the genre itself is usually so good.