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A review by its_tara
The Swan Kingdom by Zoë Marriott
3.0
One thing I can say about Zoe Marriott is that she knows how to write a Prince-Charming-type character! I enjoyed her writing style whilst reading Daughter of the Flames, and the love interest she created, and since then I’ve been waiting to read more of her stuff.
The Swan Kingdom is loosely based around The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Anderson, but the key word here is loosely. I admit, I’m not over familiar with that particular story, but from what I remember, whilst parallels between this book and the fairy tale can be drawn, there was enough original content to still keep it interesting.
I’ll start with the things that worked for me in this story. As I’ve said, Marriott has a way of building these fantastic, magical worlds with seeming ease, and they’re really easy to slip into as a reader. Secondly, the book is fast-paced. Of course, it’s another fairly short novel, but it means that as a reader there’s not much time spent sitting and waiting for things to happen. The love interest was well done and builds up gradually, especially given the brief time in the book allocated to building the relationship between Gabriel and Alexandra – no instalove here, folks. Also, I do enjoy a good fairy tale retelling, and I’d say this one was pretty good overall.
However, there were a couple of things that bugged me with this book. The first was that sometimes, it seemed like it was trying to hard to be a fairy tale. I know that sounds like a strange complaint, but it goes through phases of using phrases like “to steal into the bedroom” and “slumber”, and yet at other times I didn’t notice this kind of language at all. The other thing was that the character’s main flaw was that she was ugly. Given the build up given to this fact early in the book, I expected it to be more important later in the story, but it really wasn’t. For me, that ended up feeling like a missing factor, almost. Also, the villain. I know Zella is meant to be the evil stepmother type, and she ‘feels’ evil, but there’s no explanation really for the kinds of things she does in The Kingdom – I didn’t feel like that was explained enough. I mean yes, sucking life from the land is evil enough, but I wanted to know about the consequences, really wanted her built up as evil, maybe had some weird secret evil habits… Basically, I’m a stickler for my evil characters being really evil.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the book, but there were a few things that bothered me throughout, and in some ways I was glad that the book was as short as it is, and in others I felt like it could have been done in so much more depth, and really worked on character development and all the kind of stuff.
If you enjoy your fairy tale retellings, this one’s a relatively quick read, and fairly enjoyable, though I felt that whilst reading, I was overlooking some flaws.
The Swan Kingdom is loosely based around The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Anderson, but the key word here is loosely. I admit, I’m not over familiar with that particular story, but from what I remember, whilst parallels between this book and the fairy tale can be drawn, there was enough original content to still keep it interesting.
I’ll start with the things that worked for me in this story. As I’ve said, Marriott has a way of building these fantastic, magical worlds with seeming ease, and they’re really easy to slip into as a reader. Secondly, the book is fast-paced. Of course, it’s another fairly short novel, but it means that as a reader there’s not much time spent sitting and waiting for things to happen. The love interest was well done and builds up gradually, especially given the brief time in the book allocated to building the relationship between Gabriel and Alexandra – no instalove here, folks. Also, I do enjoy a good fairy tale retelling, and I’d say this one was pretty good overall.
However, there were a couple of things that bugged me with this book. The first was that sometimes, it seemed like it was trying to hard to be a fairy tale. I know that sounds like a strange complaint, but it goes through phases of using phrases like “to steal into the bedroom” and “slumber”, and yet at other times I didn’t notice this kind of language at all. The other thing was that the character’s main flaw was that she was ugly. Given the build up given to this fact early in the book, I expected it to be more important later in the story, but it really wasn’t. For me, that ended up feeling like a missing factor, almost. Also, the villain. I know Zella is meant to be the evil stepmother type, and she ‘feels’ evil, but there’s no explanation really for the kinds of things she does in The Kingdom – I didn’t feel like that was explained enough. I mean yes, sucking life from the land is evil enough, but I wanted to know about the consequences, really wanted her built up as evil, maybe had some weird secret evil habits… Basically, I’m a stickler for my evil characters being really evil.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the book, but there were a few things that bothered me throughout, and in some ways I was glad that the book was as short as it is, and in others I felt like it could have been done in so much more depth, and really worked on character development and all the kind of stuff.
If you enjoy your fairy tale retellings, this one’s a relatively quick read, and fairly enjoyable, though I felt that whilst reading, I was overlooking some flaws.