amrabad 's review for:

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

2.25

slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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I know Stephen King has published a million books, but the man needs a better editor. There is no reason for this book to be as long as it was. You could probably cut about 30% of this out and still have the exact same story. I’ve only read one other Stephen King book so I’m a newbie here, but my god, does he always over explain every single thing? He would sometimes say the exact same thing in two different ways exactly after each other. Almost every single thing in this story was over explained to an eye rollingly annoying degree. We get it already, there’s a language barrier between characters, so the idiom doesn’t translate well. 

All in all the story was interesting enough. The first half and second half of the story felt like two very different stories though. It also felt deceptive to draw me in with the love of a dog in the first half only to make it much less about the dog in the second half

(no she doesn’t die)

. I can’t even say that there was effective character growth. And the aggressive telling instead of showing made it an absolute slog to get through. If this hadn’t been the first pick of a new bookclub I would have DNF’d around 60%.