Dearest by Alethea Kontis

TL;DR v cute The Wild Swans retelling

TBR #1001, added Sept 15, 2014

library ebook (no hold) 9/17/16

finished 9/22/16

This was surprisingly hard to write a review for, so this is going to be really short. I apologize. (I worked more hours than normal the week I wrote this and I'm still trying to adjust to having evening classes. I've felt pretty zombie-like the past month.)

This is part of a series, which up until now I thought was a trilogy, but is actually bigger. I'm really excited that I have the chance to continue with the series and continue with more of the characters we haven't seen much of.

I think Dearest could be read without reading the two books that come before it, but it definitely helps to understand the story. I've read those them and still I had a few moments where I had to search my memory for what was being referenced. (I also have a pretty bad memory. All of them were vaguely recognizable, but I was trying to look for more specific details, and I suck with those.)

Friday was an enjoyable main character and heroine and she was so pure, like, she's practically like a saint. She spent almost the entire story helping other people out (instead of the story being about herself) and she worked so hard for them and never complained and like ... I could never do that lol. I liked her flock of children and her flock of boys (lol) a lot even though there were too many to get a good sense of all of them.

I think the pacing of the story might've been a little slow at times. (I think I read the book pretty quick overall, so I don't remember exactly.) There isn't really much action but there's definitely a lot of anticipation and working towards their goal. I don't think any specific scenes dragged out all that much. The story did wrap up well within the course of the book and had a satisfying ending. The ending surprised me a lot, actually. I was :OOOO the whole time. (Though I think an argument could be made that it was a little out of left field compared to the rest of the book.)

The romance was pretty cute even for being insta-love. I guess I'm willing to forgive that since there was actual framework in their worldbuilding for it to be legitimately fate and not just "oh, ~swoon~". They respected each other as people and sacrificed a lot for each other, which also gave it a lot of points in my opinion. And I mean, it's based on a fairy tale, so I'm willing to accept some suspension of disbelief since it was a pretty close retelling.

The series is interesting in that it seems to adapt the fairy tales closely (at least to how I know them), but there are so many being put together that there are a lot of interesting crossovers in them. It's a little bit like The Lunar Chronicles to me, but TLC takes a lot of liberty in terms of worldbuilding and interpretation of the story. The Woodcutter books exist within a fairy tale-like world and keep a lot of that magic to them, but they add to the story by including threads of other fairy tales going on at about the same time.

(I'd live in their world, tbh.)

That was more than I expected to be able to write lol ;; Overall I'm really enjoying this series so far, and I'm considering re-reading the beginning books if I get a chance. I don't know if any other books are out in the series just yet but I'm definitely going to continue with it.

TL;DR I read through the book pretty quickly and it was a nice read, and it's been a nice series. It's definitely worth checking out if you like fairy tale retellings that are closer to the source than recent trends have been and aren't all dark and depressing.

So far this is only the second retelling I've found of The Wild Swans, so if you'd like another, Spinning Starlight is a sci-fi one that focuses more on the sister of the family and her journey.