Review of Snow White Blood Red (The Grimm Diaries Prequels #1) by Cameron Jace

Snow White Blood Red by Cameron Jace

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Received: bought
Publication date: May 29th, 2012
Genres & themes: YA, short story, fairy tale retellings, vampires, fantasy, family.

BLURB:

I have always wondered why you never asked about my name. Was I so superficial to you? So stereotypical and mundane? Why did you treat me as if I were just the monster of the week? You know what I think? You never had the time to really hate me. You wanted to hate me, long before you even met me. You wanted to scrape my existence and avenge your childhood princess by laying all blame on me. What if they didn’t call me the Evil Queen, what if I told you the real story from my point of view instead of hers, would you ever think of me as an angel? Could I ever make you care? I know that deep inside of you, you adore me,but you’re just scared, afraid to admit how much you love the Snow White Queen.

This Grimm Diaries Prequels are a number of short books in the form of epistolary diary entries. The diaries are more of teasers for the upcoming series: The Grimm Diaries, allowing you to get a glimpse of what to expect of the series.

REVIEW:

Man, I liked this very short story. I liked where it was all going because I had no clues of what happened to Snow and why The Evil Queen claimed herself less blameable regarding Snow’s story. Its content is mysterious and, even though I thought I’d hate narcissistic Evil Queen, I ended up enjoying her personality and wanted to hear more of how much she loved herself.

I in fact never thought I’d say that one day…

I think that I’ve been compelled, guys. Watch out for The Evil Queen.

What you read above is what I thought I would say after starting the book…

Before The Evil Queen began saying things that brought her out of her character—the character I thought she was playing.

I just can’t stand it when characters go like this:

‘Sorry, I am a queen. I am spoiled, I am evil, I am bad. And I am dumb and an airhead. (…)’

Stop lowering yourself is the nicest thing I can think of saying right now to The Evil (Whiny) Queen.

Or when they talk like that:

‘Gag! Don’t even mention her to me. I hate her guts, that silly giggling woman.’

Fairy tale retellings are of my favourites genres. I can NEVER get enough of them because there are infinite possibilities (and I wish to know them all.)

Don’t look for a detailed world-building inside Snow White Blood Red or multiple secondary characters. As the title says, this is a prequel and will feel like it. It also contains a prequel to itself which I thought was not that necessary and I didn’t like the way it was written.

It’s funny because this book doesn’t take itself seriously when the matters and story inside it are…and at the same time don’t quite feel like they are. I am quite confused right now.

Though, now that I’ve read the author’s profile, I understand it more and feel like Mr. Jace gave a piece of himself to some of the characters and who knows what else (need to make some more research on him.)

In general, the writing is good but could obviously have been better. There are some repetitions here and there. For example:

As much as she tried to press on my thumb with all her might, her skin felt like silk around my flesh and I wished she’d never let go of me. It was true that I was her mother and she needed me to never let go of her, but little did she know that I didn’t want her to let go of me.

The author is pretty much going round and round with that quote.

Also, I am not in agreement with this:

‘You just can’t. There are some rules that girls should follow without asking.’

Now I won’t make a debate about it, but I believe the author should have written, if he REALLY wanted that phrase to appear in his book, ‘princesses’ instead of ‘girls’ because the word ‘girls’ includes too many people and different populations with a different rank and culture (in that time—19th century.) And what are those many rules anyway? Explanations would have been welcomed to clarify that which is apparently a ‘fact.’

Overall, I think this CAN be a promising prequel series and I will definitely continue with it; maybe a lovely surprise will await us in the sequels.