Mina Grime is unlucky, unpopular and uncoordinated, that is until she saves her crushes 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.
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based on 1618 reviews
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Review:
( 1618 customer reviews )
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
65 of 75 found the following review helpful:
An interesting idea, but the execution faltersJul 07, 2012
By Lizzy G. The premise and the gorgeous cover for UnEnchanted had me quite hooked, and I downloaded and started it in quick succession. And while it was a quick read, I found it didn't follow through on the promise.
Plot and Pacing: Now is a good time to be putting out fairytale twists - it's definitely popular - and I still really like the ideas behind this book. Descendants of Grimm fighting back against fairy tales out to kill them and move on to the next heir. A Story with its own ideas of how it wants things to end. And a twist at the end that I was quite happy to see. The pacing didn't quite match up, though. There's a little bit of action, a lot of talking, a little more action, a lot of storming about with angst, a quick finale, and then a cliffhanger ending.
Characters: For the most part, there isn't a lot going on. Mina is tough to get behind as a heroine because she spends most of the time telling us how unspecial she is, demanding that the hero can't possibly like someone like her, and flailing about it. She's kind of a doormat, to the point that her take-charge moments don't quite compute, and most of the book she just hopes for a boy to save her. We've got the nice, cute, rich popular guy who falls for her, and the requisite modern "bad boy" (read: gorgeous, arrogant, irritating with an emotional wall around him that no one (except the heroine!) can penetrate) who also falls for her. Both of these guys stay well-within their molds and spend most of their time swooping in to protect Mina, including dragging her places "for her own good." I think my favorite character was Nan, who started out a bit difficult to like as she seemed to exploit Mina's awkwardness for social media fame, but by the end of it, she seemed more real than any of the others, despite the fact that we spend almost no time in her head.
Writing Style: One of the biggest issues I had was the head-hopping - switching character POVs, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph with no warning. This wouldn't be so much of an issue except for the fact that the voice didn't change when the POV did. Instead of this being an effective method of looking at the plot from different angles, instead it was an excuse to flit around at random and flat-out tell the reader what the author wants you to know at any given time. In fact, we're told pretty much everything instead of being shown. The hero's feelings, the bad boy's feelings, why so-and-so is doing such-and-such - everything is explained to us point blank, which manages to kill much in the way of tension or mystery. Curbing both of these tendencies would allow room for the interesting ideas at the core of the book to breathe and flourish on their own.
I think this author has a very creative imagination and, with that, a lot of potential. The execution needs work, though, and I hope to see it improve in future projects.
90 of 107 found the following review helpful:
Great Concept, So-So ExecutionMay 02, 2012
By Victoria Paszkiewicz I gave this book three stars because I thought that the idea behind it was great and a nice change from the usual. The overall story was good.
Had the concept not been so great, though, I probably would've only rated it at 1 or 2 stars. The number of errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation jarred me out of the story repeatedly.
218 of 266 found the following review helpful:
full of errors, disappointing all aroundJun 26, 2012
By Heather M
"(a preschooler's mommy)"
I hate leaving negative reviews, but in this case, I feel like I have to speak up. I do not do this to cause hurt feelings - I appreciate that this book represents the writer's time and effort. But if time and effort were all it took for a book to be great, I wouldn't be writing a single-star review.
The idea of the book may have been interesting, and it's certainly timely, with tv shows and movies based on fairy tales popular right now. I can see why this sort of story came to the writer's mind. But an interesting premise is not enough. A good story requires well-drawn characters. None of the characters here have any real depth. They're shallowly-drawn; mere caricatures. They are unrealistic and uninteresting. Their voices are nearly interchangeable. When the point of view changes (as it does, repeatedly, without warning or need), it's actually difficult to determine whose perspective is given.
I tried to get past the undeveloped characters in the hopes that the idea itself would carry the book along, but I finally had to put the book (or rather, my Kindle) down. I could not finish reading.
Because no matter how good your idea is, the story you tell is NOT good when it's full of errors. And sadly, UnEnchanted is riddled with them. And I'm not talking about nitpicky little things that only an English teacher who loves red ink too much would find. I'm talking about errors that would have been caught by a run of grammar-check and spell-check on the author's computer. For example, the word "maked" appears around 15% of the way through. Or rather, that not-word. Even here on Amazon's review page, it's flagged as incorrect as I type. That was the last straw for me. For that, and similar errors throughout the first section of this book, there really is no defense.
If you're reading this, Ms. Hahn, I strongly suggest you do some research into the rules of written English. Buy a copy of Strunk & White's Elements of Style. Study it. Then write some more. Run spell-check. Then proofread, carefully. Find someone who can edit your writing. Take the time to get it right. Then, and only then, maybe you'll be able to take a good idea and turn it into a good story. I wish you luck.
40 of 50 found the following review helpful:
kudos to self published authorsJan 18, 2012
By Mandy As i read this book, i felt like i was in the story, living the fairy tales with Mina. I have seen reviews of this book on ibooks (which is at number two in sales) some people have mentioned the spelling errors and I recognized these as well, but I also recognize that this book is self published, which I think is a bold move seeing once you self publish a book you have to really sell it well to get backed by an agent. Let me just say that JK Rowling wrote her books on napkins and now has her books as movies. This is the next big thing,this Unenchanted series.
13 of 15 found the following review helpful:
Literally RAN for the next bookJun 14, 2012
By Brandy N. Oliver I was reclining in a lawn chair when I finished Unenchanted. I had been under the impression it was a "one-shot" story. As I neared the end and saw the story was going to leave so much hanging I started to get disappointed. Then the recommendations page at the end of the e-book told me there was another. I jumped up, ran across the yard and connected to wireless so I could order it!
This story was very different and I really enjoyed it. I normally don't read series, and probably wouldn't have started this one if I'd known it was one. I'm glad I didn't pay enough attention!
Oh, and yes, there were a couple of misspelled words and other errors, but so what? They were minor and didn't make the book difficult to read or understand. I've read plenty of books that were the same way. And to be honest, I'm so hooked that I'd rather get to read the next book with a few grammatical mistakes than have to wait for fifty people to creep through it with a fine tooth comb!
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