Review: A Grimm Legacy

A Grimm Legacy by Janna Jennings

My rating: 2 of 5 stars




I received a copy of A Grimm Legacy from the publisher in return for an honest review.

This book frustrated me quite a bit. It could have been a great story, the idea was fun and the basic story was there, but the writing lacked and let it down.

What you have here is the story of 4 children who are transported to another world and on trying to find their way home they find themselves travelling through several different fairytales. Some you may have heard of and some not so familiar.

I couldn't connect with the characters, I found myself getting frustrated with the way the author had portrayed them. It took me ages to get the characters right in my head and even then at 73% in I still wasn't sure which girl was which. The author didn't define them enough for me. I know one had blonde hair and one had dark hair but apart from that there was nothing. The author didn't given me much about them appearance wise to set them apart from each other, there was no picture built of them in my minds eye, yet I was expected to know who was who. I kept having to stop and try to remember which was which and I eventually gave up trying.

The story mostly centres around the two girls, which seemed weird to me as Frederick was really the only character that the author gave any substance to, he stood out more clearly and had way more substance than all the rest, yet he played a much smaller role than all of them. Also for some reason Quinn was the only one that got captured, not just once but every time someone got captured it was poor Quinn.

There were many places where the sentences and grammar were off and the dialogue could have been improved. Each chapter jumps between the four characters. When reading these chapters I found that sometimes on moving to the next paragraph the story had jumped ahead all of a sudden, like a part of the story was missing. Normally this would be where a new chapter would begin, but because of the chapters revolving around a character, it just goes right into a new paragraph instead and it got confusing and pulled me out of the story.

A Grimm Legacy had a lot of potential but I think it needs quite a lot of improvement and a lot more character building. The characters are flat and forgettable they need more substance. Show me, don't tell me, build the images in my mind so I can see the characters and remember them, make them stand out as individuals.

Reviews also posted to my blog: Scarlet's Web
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