The Land of Stories: The Enchantress Returns by Chris Colfer (Book Review)

The Land of Stories

The Enchantress Returns

by Chris Colfer

517 pages

Little Brown, August 2013

young adult / fiction

Read in 4 days

Rating: ★★★★

Amazon.com | BN.com

"The East was in a period of great celebration."

Review: Before I get into the positives about this book, I would like to start with what I hated about it. Now, I read and reviewed the first book last year so my memory on how it was written is a bit on the hazy side. One thing I don't recall it doing is bothering me when it came to the dialogue. Perhaps I'm wrong in this but I felt the parts where it says "he said" or "she said" was coming WAY too often without any real description behind them. I was looking for a "he answered" or "she replied" or "she screamed"?! Anything other than the word "said" would have sufficed. Especially in places where it's obvious who is talking. If you start a paragraph with describing what a particular character it doing then it stands to reason that whatever spoken sentences to follow in that same paragraph are being uttered by that character!! Now I understand this is a book for a younger audience but what they are able to understand and comprehend is far more intelligent than the way this book was written. The whole time I kept asking myself if ANYONE bothered to edit this book before putting it to press? There were a lot of grammatical and structural mistakes like that, for me, throughout the book. It got so bad that I was rewording sentences as I went along so I wouldn't give myself a headache!

But, on a good note, I found the way the different fairy tale character story lines were woven together to create the Land of Stories ingenious. I must give Chris Colfer credit for coming up with some great ideas and structure that not only works but makes sense.

Alex and Conner are back in this sequel, to stop the evil Enchantress, who's come back for revenge against the entire world for wronging her they way they did in the past. I don't want to give anything away of the story but all the usual character tales are back: Red Riding Hood, Jack, Goldilocks, Froggy (aka Charles), the Harp, the Fairy Godmother, and anyone else you can think of. Oh, and Rumplestiltskin plays a big part in this book as well.

***SPOILER ALERT***

I found it very cool the way he was made the eighth dwarf!

***END OF SPOILER***

I enjoyed it and will continue reading the rest of the installments, I just hope the writing style gets MUCH better by the third one. Oh, and quit it with all the crying! Sheesh! lol

Summary: After decades of hiding, the evil Enchantress who cursed Sleeping Beauty is back with a vengeance. Alex and Conner Bailey have not been back to the magical Land of Stories since their adventures in The Wishing Spell ended. But one night, they learn the famed Enchantress has kidnapped their mother! Against the will of their grandmother, the twins must find their own way into the Land of Stories to rescue their mother and save the fairy tale world from the greatest threat it's ever faced.

To learn more about The Land of Stories please visit this site here.