Bewitching - Alex Flinn

Title: Bewitching

Author: Alex Flinn

Rating: 5 stars

Genre:  YA Fantasy

Form:  ebook

Synopsis: (from goodreads)

Bewitching can be a beast. . . .
Once, I put a curse on a beastly and arrogant high school boy. That one turned out all right. Others didn’t.
I go to a new school now—one where no one knows that I should have graduated long ago. I’m not still here because I’m stupid; I just don’t age.
You see, I’m immortal. And I pretty much know everything after hundreds of years—except for when to take my powers and butt out.
I want to help, but things just go awry in ways I could never predict. Like when I tried to free some children from a gingerbread house and ended up being hanged. After I came back from the dead (immortal, remember?), I tried to play matchmaker for a French prince and ended up banished from France forever. And that little mermaid I found in the Titanic lifeboat? I don’t even want to think about it.
Now a girl named Emma needs me. I probably shouldn’t get involved, but her gorgeous stepsister is conniving to the core. I think I have just the thing to fix that girl—and it isn’t an enchanted pumpkin. Although you never know what will happen when I start . . . bewitching

Review:

Bewitching will not disappoint fans of Alex Flinn’s fairytale re-tellings. The synopsis says the book is about Kendra (the witch who turned Kyle into a beast in Beastly). This is true and not true. We learn more about Kendra and get a deeper feel for her personality and her start as a witch. However the majority of the story is taken up by Emma and Lisette.         

There are four fairytales that are retold in this book. I’m not telling which ones because it ruins the stories. Yes stories there are also four different stories being told. It works really well though. At times Emma and Lisette’s story got to be too tragic and too much for me to handle, I wanted to strangle Emma numerous times and usually when it got to that point, there would be a break and a short story like an intermission. It was a format I’ve never seen in a book before and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

As for the characters; I believe they were well written. I mentioned before I wanted to strangle Emma a few times, but when you really think about it and think like her, you realize it’s no surprise why she does what she does. Now Lisette was sort of hard to figure out. Where she went with her was no surprise, but it took me a while to figure out that was definitely the personality being developed for this character.

I loved the ending of this book. I was rooting for one way and then the way the author ended it was not what I expected, but so much better than what I was rooting for. I especially liked how things end for Kendra. It’s a happy ending, but not all of the tales told in the book had a happy ending.

Now I will admit, I’ve only read two of Alex Flinn’s books: Cloaked and Bewitching. I did see the movie Beastly which is alluded to in Bewitching. I plan on reading A Kiss In Time, in fact I have it requested from my library now. I really liked Bewitching better than Cloaked. I’m not sure why but Cloaked didn’t grab my attention. It was good, but it wasn’t a favorite. Bewitching however, I couldn’t put down. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone. If you love fairy re-tellings as much as I do, than this book is definitely one you should read.

Review by Stephany