Damsels in Distress (Desperately Ever After, #2)

by Laura Kenyon

[Leah]

Laura Kenyon has hit her stride with this, the second in her Desperately Ever After series. The first book was fun, but suffered a little because of its sheer scope and ambition: lots of characters to introduce, lots of backstory to fill in and at least four plots that got more-or-less equal billing. But now Rapunzel is loved-up and can support Belle without having worries of her own, Penelopea’s dance to the music of the mother-in-law from hell are a source of horror when the girls get together rather than a separate story, and Aaron and Cinderella are out of touch—rather too much so, it would seem.

That leaves the focus on Belle’s fight to keep her newly-found and hard-won independence and Dawn’s infatuation with the mysterious and rich Liam who, as the summary gives away, it turns out she has known for centuries. Belle also has a handsome stranger to deal with. Gray is literally fearless and jolly useful as a result of the skills he has learnt in travelling the world in search of it. But there is the small matter of the return of curses once broken which, according to the going-to-seed fairy Ruby Welles, will be the consequence of Belle’s split from Donner. Snow and Belle are both torn between old and new loves, marriage and freedom, and worried about the effects of their actions on huge numbers of other people as well as those close to them. That their stories counterpoint each other in this way wasn’t something I was conscious of as I read it, but may well have helped this section of the saga feel more coherent than the first. Even Dawn’s desperation for a child, which at first seems like a sub-plot, a story of its own, becomes important in several ways by the end of the book.

And that end is abrupt, leaving a lot of cliff-hangers and questions. Snow makes her choice between Davin and Hunter but it is not at all clear how this, probably the only problem that has been resolved, will turn out. While this means that I’ll be looking out for the release of book three (Skipping Midnight), I did feel just a little cheated. There’s enough information in Damsels in Distress for you to make sense of what goes on if you’ve not read Desperately Ever After, so it did feel unfinished without some proper endings of its own.

In spite of that, I did enjoy it. The characters are becoming far more rounded, further from the vacuous princess stereotype, and their relationships are continuing to develop as they go through their various crises. The political and financial machinations which are touched on in this book promise some serious conflict for the final instalment and do a lot more than cars and mobile phones to bring the fairy tales into their version of the modern world. But there is still magic in Marestam and long may it flourish.

Reviewed by CatherineThis review was originally posted on Girls Love To Read