This is the first book from the Canens Chronicles. A fantasy heavily inspired by fairytales and trying to follow a darker tone similar to the Grimm brother’s tales. It is a fairly new book, published back in 2019, and it shows with its modern style of writing. It is clean and can be read by anyone which apparently can be teens even though it has dark themes like death of children, slavery, torture and rape. Though I guess it is rather lightly touched upon, often only spoken by, in the book.
The book is mostly taken place in the land of Canens. It follows the perspective of three characters. The Snow White character, Winterberry, who is imprisoned and then sold into slavery by her stepmother so that she won’t take the throne when she turns 21. We also follow Winterberry’s stepmother Blanche, as she is trying to take over the country and free the land from a curse, and finally we follow the prince Rus who is looking for his kidnapped sister who is sold into slavery.
I wish I could give you more but the plot simply follows these three on this quest. Very few things happen that can’t be summed up with Winterberry tries to flee only to fail, Blanche find some infodump concerning either the prophecy or magic, and Rus bounces from place to place.
The writer, Kelsie Engen, seriously tries to give the character some personality but they turn out very bland while I would argue that only the stepmother is a bit more developed only because we know her motivations and ambitions.
The princess Winterberry wants apparently to be free and free all the slaves, but she fails constantly and at one point she escapes only to go back to her cell. She often never thinks about escape until random moments and I feel like they are there only to make something more interesting than Winterberry cleaning rooms would be. Unfortunately, it also always end in her failing because of plot reasons. The writer tries to make the princess full of pride but the problem with that is that pride often equals arrogance and this princess don’t see herself as above the others. She is simply to idealistic to make her realistic. That doesn’t have to be something negative for few fairytales are based on reality but fairytales often have a base morality and I am not sure what this book want to convey.
The prince’s only interest and personality is that he loves his sister and goes after her. The writer is trying to make him sympathetic by having him care for the slaves he sees, wanting to free them, but mainly seem to ignore them in order to go on to search for his sister.
The plot hints of interesting future events but none happens in this book and unfortunately, this book was not able to keep my interest long enough for me to consider continuing the book. The characters are bland and this book does not push the plot forward to the point that it feels complete. Which is rather hard thing to do in a book almost 400 pages long.
Now, would I recommend it. Not really, most likely because it won’t leave an impact on me enough for me to remember it. It isn’t an overall bad book but it isn’t a good one either according to me but I wouldn’t deter someone if they wanted to pick it up. It would be interesting to see if they would like it as I didn’t. So, how would I rate it?
With difficulty. This book has a easy to read writing style and the concept of using fairytale to kind retell the story in a different light is intriguing but I still want to see something new. This feels like so many random fantasy books I have read with nothing new added on. In order for this to work the characters have to be compelling enough in order to hold the readers interest and they weren’t to me. So, I cannot give it more than a 4 out of 10. Maybe a 5 on a good day, but if someone would have asked me to describe this book later on I would just have to say bland, if I would even remember it.
Many seem to like it on Goodreads. Did you? Have you read it?
With Kind Regards
Senefer
Read with Senefer 