Thank you Austin Macauley Publishers for this book in exchange for an honest review
Synopsis:
As the story goes, the kingdom’s prince was a wicked boy, caring for no one but himself. The King wanted to teach the Prince a lesson and sought a witch to lay a curse on him. The Prince was cursed to live in agony and solitude for the rest of eternity unless he could find someone to set him free.
Moving into the present day, the legend of The Cursed Prince is nothing but a town story that the bookshop owner told Henrietta, but when an old book shows up and lands itself in her hands, the world around Henrietta begins to unravel.
Review
The Cursed Prince by Anne Marshall is one of those books that has so much promise but unfortunately didn’t deliver. Don’t get me wrong there was some great moments in Marshall’s writing but overall I found it really lacked and tried of so hard to deliver but just didn’t cross the finish line for me.
I have been known to be a harsh review and honestly I’m proud of it. Life isn’t all about the rose coloured glasses situation, there has to be some brutality otherwise one might not be expected to get thicker skin, take heed of the comments and grow.
I read the blurb for this book and straight away loved the idea, and really the idea and the promise of that idea got this book a 3 star rating. Pretty much it is a Beauty and the Beast kind of retelling, in a sense. We have a cursed prince whom needs to be freed. We have a young woman who stumbles across the prince. We just needed a talking teapot…
See great story line. However the delivery of it wasn’t that great and unfortunately forced a distance between me liking the characters and enjoying the book. I found that a few of the paragraphs could have been trimmed to a mere sentence which would have (in my opinion) delivered a better response from readers.
Don’t get me wrong I am not a published author and nor do I work in the industry but this book was full of over explaining. Keep it simple!
I trashed the note and grabbed something cold from the fridge to drink. Finding we had orange juice, I jumped at the chance to drink some. Usually, my sister took the orange juice with her to work but this time she left it. I poured a glass and put the jug of OJ back into the fridge.
….. I don’t really care that your sister takes the OJ to work. This is a prime example of too much information.
Seeing the older man at my door left me confused and no, I was just confused.
Me too buddy…
I also found the character reactions to situations poorly executed. For instance the older confusing man at the door that I mentioned above disappeared in front of her and the only word that was used to describe this was ‘odd.’ Honestly if a dude disappeared from my front door while I was standing there it would be a real ‘where the hell did he go?’ Instead we got: I looked at the envelope and before I looked back up he was gone, odd. Nothing else. At least be like yeahhh that’s creepy as hell or how does the old man move that fast and what’s his secrets???
After that I stopped noting down examples because I came to some truly odd situations. Like two pages of our main character Henrietta cleaning the castle… We don’t need that much detail about her cleaning, what she clean and how she cleaned it. It would have better if it was simplified to: ‘after she finished cleaning….’
Another massive and poorly written part of the story was when our main character encounters the prince and he starts to attack her and feed off her. But don’t worry she had a perfectly normal reaction of being calm, cool, collected and expressed no fear at all. Literally no screaming, punching, kicking, internal dialogue of freaking the hell out. Not even a ‘please MR, please don’t kill me.’
Summing this up. The idea was great. The writing was too detailed and left little or no room for us to piece together what was happening, instead we got paragraphs on the OJ story. The writing also impacted the character reactions and caused them to be unrealistic, un-relatable and uninteresting. The flow of the story and its foundations were good though.
Ratings: 3/5
ISBN: 9781787102941
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers