Review: UnEnchanted (An Unfortunate Fairy Tale #1) by Chanda Hahn

Title: UnEnchanted

Series: An Unfortunate Fairy Tale #1

Author: Chanda Hahn

Genre: YA, urban fantasy, fairy tale retelling

Publication date: December 2011

Published by: Chanda Hahn

Source: Amazon freebie

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Synopsis:

Mina Grime is unlucky, unpopular and uncoordinated; until she saves her crush's life on a field trip, changing her High School status from loser to hero overnight. But with her new found fame brings misfortune in the form of an old family curse come to light. For Mina is descended from the Brothers Grimm and has inherited all of their unfinished fairy tale business. Which includes trying to outwit a powerful Story from making her it's next fairytale victim.

To break the fairy tale curse on her family and make these deadly occurrences stop, Mina must finish the tales until the very Grimm end.

My rating: ★★★☆☆
I was very excited to read this book because I love fairy tale retellings and the premise of UnEnchanted sounded amazing! Basically there is a Grimm curse that kills the descendants of the Grimm brothers... unless they can break it by living through the fairy tales. It’s such a cool concept! However, the execution was not so great 😬

Brody and Mina were pretty cute together. I like when the love interest is protective of the main character, I think it’s cute. But Brody? Omg he was suffocating! All of these characters just ran hot and cold all the time! One moment they’re being all cute and sweet and the next they’re yelling at each other and just... wtf?! Mina sometimes got angry at things that didn’t make sense. Some of her actions and overreactions just left me super confused. It just didn’t make sense to me! For example, Brody saves Mina at one point but then she proceeds to yell at him because... why? I’m not even sure. Then later on she’s all like “Uhhh I don’t know why he’s upset with me 🤪” You idiot, you yelled at him! Anyway, every single one of these characters gave me whiplash.

I enjoyed the multiple POVs, but the sudden changes totally threw me off. There was no warning or rhyme or reason every time the POV changed. There was also a moment where there was some exposition dump, which I’m never a fan of, even though I did want to know the info. The writing itself was also not great. I don’t know how to describe it other than it was kind of a mess. There was quite a bit of fluff and there was one scene in particular that was unnecessarily long.

But having said all that, I didn’t hate this book. Yes, it had its issues with the characters that were a hot mess (among other things), but I also enjoyed some aspects of it. I liked the magic, the fairy tales that were intertwined, and just the concept of the Grimm curse. The ending was kind of off for me, so I don’t know that I’ll be continuing this series. But it this sounds like something you might like, I say go for it! You do you! Lol.

Updated cover:

Have you read this book? If so, what did you think about it? If not, what do you think? Does it sound like something you might want to read? Leave me a link to your review or comment below! 😊