In a Nutshell: Yikes!

Story Synopsis:

Five female students of Chaminade High have been murdered within a few days, with their bodies positioned in a fairy-tale like tableau. To locate the killer, rookie detective Callum Penderson has been posing as a student at the school, trying to get intoi the inner circle of the popular boys, aka the ‘Princes’, in a bid to find more. But he soon discovers that the situation is far more intricate than he had assumed.

This standalone short story is a part of the Faraway series, described on Amazon as “a collection of retold fairy tales that take the happily-ever-after in daring new directions.”

As a reader, you can have mainly two kinds of experiences with this story:

➤ You will enjoy the portrayal of toxic masculinity as depicted through various male characters, reading the story like a kind of satirical comment on masculine behaviour, and applaud the author for showing such misogynistic behaviour as is.
OR
➤ You will keep rolling your eyes at the hackneyed, one-dimensional portrayal of toxic masculinity that touches upon everything from sexism to sexual assault to homophobia, jumping from trope to trope without doing justice to any of the themes.

My rating tells you which category I fit in.

The story matches the theme of the Faraway collection only partially. It isn’t a retold fairytale. Rather, it incorporates elements from various fairytales into the murders. The ending is definitely not a happily-ever-after, but comes straight out of one of Poirot’s most popular mysteries. While I could see this ending coming because of the ample foreshadowing, it did suit the story and ended it on the right note of ‘What will happen next?’ So, a good, if not original, ending. There’s also some decent diversity in the cast, which can be credited to the author’s roots. (BiPoc authors are far better at ensuring racial inclusiveness.)

That’s all the positive stuff I have to say about this little story of 53 pages. Now get ready for the deluge of negatives.

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Winter 2021 (January);

This really wanted to be more interesting than it ended up being. The highest praise I can say in the favor of the story is that it had the best internal references to the most fairytale lore/characters/places of the entire collection. That said, for the most part, I was bored of this, and I predicted the murderer by about the last third. I was surprised a little on the note that ended on. ( )

Despite being in a collection of "fairy tales for the here and now" this book is not anything like a fairy tale. A better comparison would be the movie "Seven" except using princesses instead of the seven deadly sins. I thought the interview-style format of the text was an interesting way to tell this story, though it did mean that I have very little idea what any of the characters look like, sound like, etc. I have no sense of them as more than caricatures. It was also amusing (at first) that all of the "princes" have names out of Disney movies.

Not my kind of story, though fans of thrillers may enjoy it. ( )

Stay cation and pandemic read ( )

Faraway Series

The Prince and the Troll - Faraway, Book 1 - Rainbow Rowell - 3 Stars - Adam, Unnamed Troll? - An unlikely friendship between a man and a creature who helped him save his phone from under a bridge. It's a strange modern fairy tale world and I’m not sure I understood all that was going on but I enjoyed it.

Hazel and Gray - Faraway, Book 2 - Nic Stone - 3.5 Stars - Hazel, Gray - The most messed up version of Hansel and Gretel I’ve ever read…. Well, the original was pretty jacked too. There were some crazy twists in this story but I liked that. The end felt kind of unfinished.

The Princess Game - Faraway, Book 3 - Soman Chainani- 3.5 Stars - too many to list - Girls in Chaminade High School are being murdered and the “Princes'' a.k.a. popular boys are suspects. Two local police officers go undercover to try and catch the perps but blow their cover and it all goes sideways. I think I was most interested in this story. Probably because it has been the most straightforward and I knew exactly who the killer was. That did not diminish my pleasure in listening to the book. I’m glad they went for a full cast of narrators as there were a lot of characters. Even with the multiple cast I still didn’t know who was talking sometimes.

The Cleaners - Faraway, Book 4 - Ken Liu - 3 Stars - Clara, Beatrice, Gui - I have no idea what fairy tale this was supposed to be but that’s not the first with this series. The sister’s story was kinda interesting and so was Gui’s however I’m not sure how they connect and I left the story just feeling confused.

The Wickeds - Faraway, Book 5 - Gail Forman - 3.5 Stars - Elsinora, Gwendolyn, and Marguerite - The real story of Cinderella, Snow White and Repunzel’s mothers. This was a story I could get behind. I was still left with a sense of being confused but I loved the takes on what “really” happened as opposed to the highly exaggerated stories we know. ( )