Chris Colfer

Representation: N/A
Trigger warnings: Fire, death of a child in a lake, near death experiences
Score: Six points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

After I read Twin Crowns which was a good fantasy novel I hoped that I would enjoy another one similar to that but alas I did not since I couldn't get over all the issues that it had which was a shame and the author could've done a much better job than that. The story starts off with the two main characters Alex and Conner Bailey who live with their grandmother after their father died in a car crash and the former is the only kid in that book who likes fairy tales and so she was given a book called The Land of Stories and somehow she got inside the book alongside her brother. The worldbuilding was fine however the basic writing style kind of ruined it and if it were more descriptive and some questions about it were answered it would've been better but maybe it gets better if I read the five other books in the series as well as the spinoff/prologue to this novel called A Tale of Magic made by the same author. Conner was fine however Alex was a pretentious annoying know-it-all and she really got on my nerves and she only developed her character towards the end of the book when she stopped annoying her brother. They were trapped in the Land of Stories and asked someone how to get home and she gave them a book from his father on eight items they needed to get home and eventually they find them but not before the main antagonist the Evil Queen uses it first and there was also a side plot involving Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks however I didn't care for both of them as they weren't well written and the entire subplot wasn't really needed but it was a nice break from the main plot. Two things that I really didn't like was how Alex and Conner nearly died like 10 times and one time they fell off a cliff into the ocean and a deus ex machina was used when some random mermaids saved them and some of the items were rather easy to get which was a bit convenient and the second thing was the metaphors which were a hasty attempt to try and improve the writing with figurative devices but it didn't work in this case and I disliked them since they made the book a bit worse overall. If you like middle grade fantasy stories pick this one however there are better ones out there you can read like the Keeper of the Lost Cities series by Shannon Messenger or even The School for Good and Evil series by Soman Chainani which I thought was slightly better than this.… (mer)