Book review: UnEnchanted (An Unfortunate Fairy Tale #1) by Chanda Hahn

Mina Grime is unlucky, unpopular and uncoordinated, that is until she saves her crush's life on a field trip, changing her High School status from loser to hero overnight. But with her newfound fame brings misfortune as an old family curse come to light. For Mina is descended from the Brothers Grimm and has inherited all of their unfinished fairy tale business. Which includes trying to outwit a powerful Story from making her its next fairytale victim.

To break the fairy tale curse on her family and stop these deadly events, Mina must finish the tales until the very Grimm end.

Like a lot of people, I downloaded this book because it’s free on Amazon.  Can’t go wrong with free, right?  Despite that it’s one of the most popular free downloads on the site in its categories, though it’s… not that great.  I’d say it’s a little below average at best.

There are definitely good parts about this, but not a lot.  Plenty of the scenes I liked the concept of, for example, and the plot itself is one that could’ve been great.  But the writing and execution is… meh.  Even if a book is self-published it should be polished as much as possible, and it's obvious in some places that it wasn’t.  For instance, one minute Jared is just this mysterious guy who seems to be helping Mina out for unknown reasons, and the next Mina suddenly knows he’s a fae, with no explanation of her thought process.  However, this is kind of made worse by the fact that the fae are never explained.  I felt like I was missing something when they were suddenly thrust in there without even a short infodump explanation of something Mina’s mother said like Hahn did every other time.

There’s also the fact that Mina just readily accepts what her mother tells her, and even says it “explains” some things.  Like, what?  The moving around, sure, but her mother consciously put her daughter down and made her feel like an outsider because she thought it would make it harder for the Grimm Curse to find them.  I can’t really say I can sympathize with her, especially since it didn’t work.

All-in-all, this is one of those books that could’ve been great, and does have some spots where it is, but it’s just not there.  The other two books in the series aren’t free and I can’t say I’m willing to pay four dollars for more of the same.  Maybe I’ll keep an eye out for them being made free, though.