"Winterspell" by Claire Legrand: review

 

Winterspell
by Claire Legrand

Expected publication: September 30th 2014 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

The clock chimes midnight, a curse breaks, and a girl meets a prince . . . but what follows is not all sweetness and sugarplums.

New York City, 1899. Clara Stole, the mayor's ever-proper daughter, leads a double life. Since her mother's murder, she has secretly trained in self-defense with the mysterious Drosselmeyer.

Then, on Christmas Eve, disaster strikes.

Her home is destroyed, her father abducted--by beings distinctly nothuman. To find him, Clara journeys to the war-ravaged land of Cane. Her only companion is the dethroned prince Nicholas, bound by a wicked curse. If they're to survive, Clara has no choice but to trust him, but his haunted eyes burn with secrets--and a need she can't define. With the dangerous, seductive faery queen Anise hunting them, Clara soon realizes she won't leave Cane unscathed--if she leaves at all.

Inspired by The Nutcracker, Winterspell is a dark, timeless fairy tale about love and war, longing and loneliness, and a girl who must learn to live without fear.




Me after finishing this book:

My momma always told me: Never judge a book by its cover. But I always do. So, can you imagine my disappointed when I found such a wonderful cover for such a lame story? I mean, it`s a retelling of a Nutcracker, I never thought it could be twisted into a boring tale. Thanks to Clara, now i know it`s possible.

So, Clara lives in New York (19th century) with her shitty father, who drinks a lot after death of his wife, and a sister, who is all sunshine and butterflies. Her father works for the Mafia, but now that he got batshit crazy, they don’t need him anymore. It means two things: 1) they’ll kill him; 2) Clara will become a wife (or rather a sex toy) for Dr. Victor – mad pervert who claims to be a doctor but in reality he just tortures poor young girls. Clara also has a Godfather who taught her to fight, so in a tough moment she could flip her inner badassness. Do you think it helped? Nah. While at the training, Clara is all catlike and strong, but when she meets one of the Mafiosi, she’s quiet, scared and submissive.
I also couldn’t grasp why nobody tried to protect her. She has a father, though drunk but still loving, as I understood, and a Godfather who obviously had a thing for her mother, but still won’t say fuck off to the guy who wants to rape his Goddaughter.
The second thing I couldn’t grasp was Clara’s love to a statue. Yes, you heard me right. She touched it, kissed it, had dirty thoughts about it and all that went with a bubbling of a prude girl from 19th century.
I was like:



It’s not right, it’s sick!
The funny thing is, imagine her shock when the statue became a boy! Who was there every time Clara decided to touch her statue in inappropriate way. Seriously, even I felt embarrassed for her and sat with a facepalm for a minute or two.

Okay, back to the plot. So, the Mafiosi guys decide that it’s time to get rid of her father, and Clara incidentally overhears them. Her training doesn’t help her much, and she gets caught. The Bad Guys give her an ultimatum: either she won’t tell anybody, or she and her sister are as good as dead. She agrees, and at that moment I was like: well, of course she agrees, and now she will think of some devious plan to save her family and kill all her enemies, MUAHAHAHAH. Like hell! She seriously thought about giving up on her father. What a role model!

But then she is temporary saved from decision-making by a sudden attack of some iron monster mice. Turns out her Godfather is not who she thinks he is, and he CAN kick some asses! Then the statue turns to a boy, all is cool, blah-blah-blah, I want to know who killed my mother, blah, it’s all your fault, blah and then, suddenly, whoopsy, her father is taken by one of the attacking mice through some portal to who knows where. Or, the statue boy knows where, actually. He says that the portal will take them to his kingdom that was conquered by Anise, the queen of the fairies and the most powerful creature in Cane. He offers to help Clara to find her father, and though the Godfather told her this statue boy (Nicholas) isn’t trustworthy, she agrees and jumps with him through the portal. That’s where the real adventure starts.
And now I want to show you some examples of why I didn’t like this book:

1) Clara is illogical. Like, when she fist came in Cane and saw a train, she immediately thought that her father was on it. Why the hell did she think so?
Oh, yes, there’s a train, so my father must be on it! Oh, but here is a tree, maybe my father is on it? Oh, but there is a stone, maybe my father is under it?
She often makes strange assumptions without any facts. She thinks that it’s her fault that this old pervert Dr. Victor dreams about raping her. How sick is that??? She claims that her only goal is to save her father as fast as she can, but she takes her time, all the way thinking about how beautiful Nicholas is. She easily leaves her friends and family in trouble.

2) The romance was just plain. I felt no chemistry, even more, it annoyed me. Nicholas was a simple character to whom I didn’t feel any connection. In the middle of the book he did something ugly, horrible, UNFORGIVABLE. I started to think that maybe he was the bad guy and the story would have an interesting twist. Ha-ha, nope. Then he just said sorry to Clara for his UNFORGIVABLE deed, and she was like: “Well, he’s so cute, so why not?”



3) I disliked ALL the characters. Really, they all were full of shit. I understand that nobody’s perfect, but those were more bad than good. The plot was okay, but it didn`t save the case. The final battle was just gross and ended before started. The only thing I liked was the writing style. It was pretty, it didn’t bug me.

4) This book is also about sexuality, sexual slavery, sexual awareness, sex and so one. Clara seems to be prude at the beginning, but then we find out about the statue. There was the moment, when Nicholas kissed her, and she was like: “Don’t touch me, stop it! Why the hell did you stop?!”, so she’s that kind of girl. Dr. Victor rapes the girls, and it has a lethal effect on them. Clara and Nicholas end up in a whorehouse for fairies. Anise, apparently, is a bisexual. You can see the pattern. I think there should be books about all this, but not in a retelling of the Nutcracker. There it just seems weird and out of place.

I can keep on and on, but I think it’s time to stop. Though I dislike this book, I`m still thinking about reading other books of this author. Hope they will be better.