A review by anatrnd
Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw

2.0

i'm a huge fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas, it's one of my favorite animated movies, and i love everything Tim Burton does (though this movie was directed by Henry Selick, but those are still Tim's characters). that's why i was really excited to read this book, but it was just SO bad.

first of all, it's not young adult book. i don't know why it was promoted like that one, but it's actually a middle-grade book. also, it's a really short story, and that's a problem, because everything happens just too fast, but at the same time i was dying from boredom while reading it.

the writing is just bad. it has nothing special, it's too simple, and i felt all the time like i was reading a mediocre fanfiction on wattpad. also, there were too many descriptions of everything (surroundings, characters, actions) and the author kept repeating us some things (like, for example, that Sally is a ragdoll, like we've known that for years, STOP IT).

it felt like the author watched the original animated movie just once and didn't even bother to rewatch it. this book isn't aligned with the original story, canon, at all. there are some things in Sally's backstory that definitely couldn't have happened, and most of the characters are acting completely different. moreover, they are so boring here. i loved all those creatures in the movie, because everyone was somehow special, and here, in this book, they are just blank.

wouldn't recommend it to anyone, especially to those people, who actually love the movie and have watched it at least more than once.