Let me preface this review by stating that this is one of the best books I’ve read this year! It was one of my most highly anticipated releases, I requested it and entered so many giveaways for a chance to win this book and while I didn’t win any of them I have to admit that this book was worth the wait!

Forest of A Thousand Lanterns is a retelling of the origin story of the Evil Queen. It’s set in Asia and is full of Asian folklore and mythology! I’m pretty unfamiliar with this so it all felt really new and unique to me which I think is great because it shows how important representation is in every aspect of a book rather than just having a few diverse characters. (Not that THAT isn’t important but I feel like people talk so much about how important it is to have diverse characters but diverse settings and mythologies are important too!) The diversity in the setting here creates a really beautiful story. The descriptions of everything a long with the mythology and folklore I mentioned earlier create a really beautiful and vivid story, it becomes so easy to picture everything and to be immersed into this story. This story also just has a really creepy theme overall that gets progressively darker as the story goes on and I can’t get into that too much without giving a lot away but it’s just really well done and adds so much to the story!

One of the best aspects of this story is that even though it is a retelling/origin story and therefore has to end a certain way, I found myself so absorbed in this story and the characters that I let myself hope there would be a different outcome. Even with things that I could not hope to turn out differently, I was temporarily blind to their importance until the end when so much falls into place. I was so swept up in this particular origin story that I was able to just enjoy it as it was rather than viewing every tiny detail as a reason to be concerned. That being said, once I finally began to acknowledge the parallels to Snow White that are hidden throughout the story I was really excited to see them fit so flawlessly in this story, and also found myself really excited to see more of them in the next book (or so I hope)!

Another great thing about this book is that despite the fantasy aspect of this book this story is full of so many important messages. This story has a lot of different meanings like how knowledge is power, our choices define us, you can’t outrun fate and some other ones that I’ll let ya figure out when you read it yourself. It’s just a story that is about more than the characters you read about, because like a classic fairy or folk tale it teaches the readers something along the way.

This story had a lot of twists and turns that kept me on my toes despite this being a story that could only end so many ways. But the way that this story gets from the start to the end, is what surprised me. There was so much that I expected to happen and it did happen but not in the way that I was anticipating. And yet in retrospect it makes perfect sense to the story. All the characters motives are so easy to follow and understand, nothing felt like it was thrown in purely for a wow factor and everything felt important while reading it.

This story was pretty much everything I wanted it to be and more. I’m already super excited for book 2.