Reviewed by sa090 on
I followed Jen Campbell for a while on YouTube since I wanted to know more about the origins of certain fairy tales and she more than delivered, so when I learned that she wrote some books as well, I was really interested to see her take on them and unfortunately, I’ll have to say that I’m really disappointed.
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It’s a collection of short stories so obviously I wasn’t going to enjoy all of them, but liking 3 or 4 out of the 12 is really disappointing. I think the main reason why I disliked this collection is because of the way most of the stories were written, and it’s not because it’s “badly” written, no, it’s because the stories more often than not felt pointless. This vague and sort of haphazard way of telling a story without reaching an actual conclusion, or better yet get a point across made the experience quite awful for the majority of the book. I don’t like to waste my time with something I don’t enjoy, and if this book wasn’t structured as a short story collection, it’ll probably have been dropped a long time ago.
It doesn’t make much sense for a story to start and end without it feeling like it actually “ended”, assuming you have finished telling it of course, which I assumed this short collection would entail. But I’m guessing it was not the case, I got some references which I believe were inspired from fairy tales and some incorporation of mental illness and other disorders which would’ve been really nice to read her take on them given her level of research, but again, it felt more like a draft to me than a finished cohesive product.
I will sum up my experience for each story below in very short, non-spoiler comments since I doubt I’ll be able to talk about some of these stories in length with how it varies from a few pages to 10+ pages:
Story 1: Interesting and rightfully creepy take on the situation, I liked how she incorporated the animal details, but I can’t stand obsessiveness to begin with.
Story 2: Felt haphazardly told, but I liked that it was from the perspective of a child who’s going through some things because of the decision around him.
Story 3: Bored me to death and I honestly had no idea where she was going with this one.
Story 4: One more story that felt pointless, the protagonist reacted stupidly towards the situation, even though it felt like it’s going for a “mystery” and of course the conclusion was not satisfying nor informative whatsoever.
Story 5: More of my own lack of acceptance of the entities discussed here for different reasons, so I didn’t really enjoy it much and it also felt way too all over the place to be cohesive.
Story 6: Liked this one very much, wished it wasn’t so short.
Story 7: Easily the one I enjoyed the most, the format of story telling + the interactions between the characters was insanely fun for me. The topic being discussed in this way was also pretty appropriate for it, in my opinion.
Story 8: The possible mental illness to it was interesting to read about, but other than that felt directionless.
Story 9: I liked this story as well given the added mythology and the proceedings, probably the one that felt the most complete out of all. But, I wish that Jen Campbell actually researched Islam before trying to mention something from it that shows nothing but a lack of basic research.
Story 10: I didn’t enjoy this one, the actions of the characters are exactly the type I don’t enjoy reading about. The saving grace, is that it felt complete as is.
Story 11: Felt way too vague and way all over the place to make sense of what the point of this is to me.
Story 12: Felt way too haphazard that I completely missed the point of why this exists.
I think it’s safe to say that I wasn’t impressed by most of them, although there are some gems, but I always wish for a better experience whenever I read something and this one unfortunately didn’t deliver on it.
Final rating: 2/5
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 29 December, 2018: Finished reading
- 29 December, 2018: Reviewed