Reviews tagging 'Grief'

Poor Unfortunate Soul: A Tale of the Sea Witch by Serena Valentino

1 review

shannasbooksnhooks's review against another edition

🎵I admit that in the past I've been a nasty. They weren't kidding when they called me, well, a witch.🎵
Okay, so this is going to be a long-ish review, so please just bear with me. 😐🫥 Also, I did hide this entire review due to spoilers because . . . I don't think I can go about this review without spoilers and by hiding them with the spoiler format feature multiple times in my review.
"A dark gray mist followed Ursula like creeping tentacles as she made her way through the seemingly abandoned town of Ipswich."
I would say this book is somewhere between 3.75-4 stars for me. I just decided to mark it as 4 stars because I kept going back and forth between the different star ratings. This wasn't a "bad" book - it was good, well written, and fit in with the first two books (Fairest of All and The Beast Within).

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body shaming, Bullying, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Death, Emotional abuse, and Grief

Going into all three of these books, I was expecting books that were part of a series but weren't necessarily dependent on the other books in the series. This is a Disney Villains series, so the books are connected that way. However, I expected backstories of the individual villains without the books' plots overlapping with each other. I liked seeing recurring characters - like how we get Circe, Ruby, Lucinda, Martha, and Tulip - and seeing the villains in each other's stories and knowing each other. However. I was not expecting this book series to be a traditional book series, which threw me off. Fairest of All worked out nicely. It was nice seeing the connections in The Beast Within. But this book is where the overarching plot of the series went too far in my opinion. This book, despite any previous assumptions I had or other potential readers have, is not Ursula-centric. Yes, we get Ursula's backstory - her human adoptive father being murdeered and being Triton's sister. However, this book gets going like it's the start of The Little Mermaid movie but from Ursula's perspective, which is not what I wanted nor expected coming off of the first two books. Additionally, there are so many other subplots - Princess Tulip Morningstar's suitors, Nanny being a witch and the "The One from Legends", Ruby, Lucinda, and Martha trying to find Circe (who was being held captive by Ursula) - that this book gets overwhelming and too much despite being 196 pages. And while I don't mind Princess Tulip or Nanny, I just don't care about them. Their plot could have ended once she left the Prince's/Beast's palace in The Beast Within. (Also, what's with her name? It's not a bad name, but "Tulip Morningstar"? Really?) And you're telling me that Tulip and Aurora are cousins since their mothers are sisters? If that's not confirmed in Maleficient's story, I give up. I wanted to like this book, and I did once I mentally stepped back from all the chaos of multiple subplots. But what I really wanted was an Ursula-centric story where we get the lead-up to The Little Mermaid movie. 😬🫠