Boring, hideous, and unnecessary.

The front cover teases that this book is going to be about what happened after Jack's initial adventure, but it's largely not about Jack or the giantess he left behind. Instead of a sequel, or even a villain sympathy story like Wicked, it's just a straight retelling, and not a very imaginative one. What is added to the plot is grotesque (spiders with human heads for thoraxes?!?! WHYYY?!?!), but not in a way that creates a pervasive Gothic tone or social commentary or anything elevated. It's just the same old story of a starving boy accidentally growing a giant beanstalk, attempting to rob a giant, and having to fell the beanstalk before the giant can squash him... with the occasional, sudden, unearned, nightmare fuel spider. There was nothing artistic or fairytale in the way that the story was told, it just plodded from plot point to plot point, very didactic, with - again - the occasional jump-scare spider. Relying so heavily on shock value in order to feel adventurous, instead of building the world, or giving us character dynamics to relate to, really made the book flat and lifeless. There was nothing gained by reading this version that someone wouldn't have already gotten by reading the original.

I could once again see how this Further Tale would be the seed for Happenstance Found: There was the mysterious, whimsical, timeless Greeneyes; there was the depressed but kind "wizard"; there was the warmonger-slash-inventor come to conquer and destroy the world; there was the castle by the sea.... But it wasn't fun to note those similarities. It made me feel like either A) Catanese is afraid to write their own story, and is using pre-existing fairytales as training crutches; or B) Catanese can only tell one story.

This book actively put me off this author for good, because I feel like they just can't deliver anything new or worthwhile. :/