The Sisters Grimm

Book Title: The Sisters Grimm

Author: Menna van Praag

Date Started: June 18th 2020

Date Completed: June 22nd 2020

Genres: Fantasy

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: One Star

Final Rating: Two Stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

Okay. Usually, when I'm not enjoying a book, I try and get 25% of the way through to really give it a good run up at convincing me it's worth my time. And, while the 15% of the way I got through The Sisters Grimm didn't take me that much reading time, I just did not want to continue at all.

The first thing that hit me was that it felt very Disney: wishy-washy fairytale/fantasy with kind of sickly sweet but very bluntly 'twisted' darkness that it just kind of felt silly. You also have quite a lot of sex which is so obviously added to make it feel 'mature', but just makes it feel even more misjudged and childish because it's completely pointless. How old are these characters anyway? Aren't they supposed to be approaching their 18th birthday? I have nothing against girls owning their sexuality but the characters are written with such freedom, independence and priorities that make them feel like they're in their mid-twenties and that's honestly confusing.

The changing perspectives definitely don't help this when they're entirely unmotivated and near impossible to distinguish without the named headings. POVs even change within chapters for seemingly no reason, mixing differently storylines until there's way too much going on and you can't separate one thing from the others. It's almost like Praag was worried that we'd forget about the other characters if she focused on one at a time so she just squished them all together when maybe the book should have been focused on just one of them.

The Sisters Grimm is also so overwritten with vague information-dumping. 15% is a decent amount through a nearly 500-page book and I still have no idea about how this world is supposed to work - even though 70% of what I read was shoving worldbuilding down my throat. I just wanted to shout at it to stop trying to be mysterious and actually tell me a story. The diversity of its protagonists could've driven this, but it fades when no one feels distinctive. A lot of effort went into detailing every tiny little thing that happened in their childhood and with their families, but I honestly couldn't tell you which unnecessary exposition was for which character. I think that's actually the main problem: the book is so concerned with telling us everything that happened before the story that it never gets to the fricking story.

And, yes, I only read 15%. Surely this changes? Well, reading other reviews, I'm not convinced it does. I would've been willing to press through if things progressed further than these tiny snippets of each person's melodramatic domestic life, but it doesn't seem like it will. (I actually very rarely refer to other people's reviews while reading a book, but I needed some confirmation that I wasn't wasting my time - which, sadly, I did not find). It's fair to say Praag lost my trust in her to tell me a story pretty quickly and sadly I just didn't want to keep reading.