Reviewer: Andrea
I received a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
The Summary:
Neva is different. Aside from having a phobia of mirrors and an unquenchable desire for apples, she harbors a dark secret. She’s been cursed to repeat the same three years of her life over and over again. Unfortunately, these three years happen to be Neva’s sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school, and high school’s not that easy when everyone considers you a freak. To break her curse, Neva must accomplish a grisly task that she can’t bring herself to complete. Will Neva break her curse in time, or will she be bound by it forever?
The Review:
I love the “retelling” genre. I love allusion and the notion of taking a very old story and restyling it, but there is something to be said about subtly. I almost want to be able to read a retelling without seeing the obvious signs of a retelling. I like to find little gems of the original story. This novel wasn’t like that. It was an in-your-face restyling of the fairytale of Snow White to the point of being irksome. So many things bothered me about the novel.
Neva has been sentenced to high school hell, forced to relive the ages of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. She has an inability to look into a mirror and a propensity for anything apple-ish. It seemed that every scene involved an apple or something apple flavored. I get it. She’s Snow White. The repetitious use of these things seemed insulting to the reader. It is a YA fiction, but the audience of this novel isn’t stupid. They will see the similarity without the proverbial beating a dead horse.
Also, I work in a school. The amount of paperwork is overwhelming at times. How has Neva managed to change schools this many times with no paperwork? When her three years are up, she and her father just move, change names, and start somewhere else. That didn’t make sense to me. We don’t live in the Dark Ages. There is no way they could logically do this. Henry brought another set of issues. (SPOILER ALERT) How is Henry never seen by the neighbors? He sits on their side of a fence with a radio sometimes, yet he’s not seen? He comes and goes in Neva’s house near the end, yet her “father,” a huntsman, never sees him? How is he able to come and go like this?
Many elements felt like afterthoughts. The huntsman’s desire for hearts is weird, and he’s so secondary to the story, like he’s thrown in for only the purpose of having an adult. The Red Witches’ story was odd as well. When Neva finally confronts the witch, the witch informs her that she is prohibited from killing a princess by a curse? There just wasn’t a lot of foreshadowing.
I had a hard time getting a read on Neva. She seemed tough and smart sometimes but really naïve other times. In the scene where Neva is taken to the fair after hours, no alarm bells go off when she sits on the lap of a boy she doesn’t know. She’s supposed to be over two hundred years old, but this doesn’t seem odd to her?
The whole thing seemed disjointed, and I found myself scanning just to finish.
2 Stars
