I ended up liking this quite a bit more than I expected going in, though it didn't completely win me over.

Let me admit this upfront: Beauty and the Beast is my absolute favorite Disney movie, and may be my favorite movie full stop. I don't mind weird twistings of the original story, but the Disney version itself is almost sacred to some extent, so messing things up was going to go very very badly with me.

This didn't really mess things up.

Now, I admit the Beast was a horrible person, but that's kind of part and parcel of the origin story of the movie. He's supposed to have been a huge spoiled brat who thinks quite a lot of himself, but it was hard to read sometimes. Yes, he starts out problematic in the movie, but not to the extent that he was before the curse had taken hold, so seeing him at his full "glory" as a bit of a womanizing bastard was kind of rough reading, especially from his point of view.

It was intriguing, however, to see how things were "before", and to see what precisely caused him to be cursed. Some liberties were taken, though they are certainly excusable given the framing of the film, and they add some interesting factors to what appears to be a series of Disney tie-ins. The idea of a shared Disney universe is a lot of fun, and I'm willing to make allowances in order to have that and to see more of it.

I was not expecting the prominence of certain characters, and the way that was handled was clever. It added a depth to certain scenes in the movie that weren't there without the idea of that backstory, as did the exact nature of the curse, which was darker even than the movie suggested but still managed to fit in perfectly with the plot of the film.

I'm definitely picking up the other book in the series, and I look forward to more. If the author can manage to give me something that adds depth to a film I adore, I am intrigued to see what can be done with those Disney movies that I don't hold the same regard for, and to explore this new extended universe and see how things work.

This wasn't really a bad book, but unfortunately I saw the twist coming extremely early (as in about 10% in), which in a book that relies on said twist is a very frustrating thing.

The set-up is interesting, though I have a strange fondness for books set in psychiatric hospitals, and the characters themselves were well-drawn, though a bit prone to teenage drama and angst, even for characters in this situation. Occasionally our narrator would make a scene over something that seemed insanely minor to me in comparison to something she had just handled with nary a complaint, so the see-sawing in that regard was a bit frustrating. I felt like I had just the right combination of feelings about Alice for a thriller-type novel, and this might have been a hit with me if I had been wrong about the plot.

It's not a bad plot, don't get me wrong. It's well-told and goes back and forth between "now" and "before" in a way that I have always liked in my books, but the hints were way too heavy-handed for me and I guessed things way too early. Once I had guessed, there was not a single concern that I was wrong at any point, either: everything seemed to be pointing that way once I was looking for it. That's something that is very hard to forgive in a thriller, because it takes the thrill right out of it. I might simply be a bit jaded with the genre, admittedly--if you can't guess the ending, this is definitely an intriguing read.

My rating on this book went between "I'm annoyed and don't like this" and "this is awesome!", hence the settling at a three. It was a very hard book to rate, and this is probably going to be a very hard review to write.

The problem I had was that there was an amazing and fascinating world set up, with mysteries and clever ideas and magic that I really liked, and characters I wanted to murder that were, unfortunately, not the bad guys.

It started off with our main character apparently misreading someone very badly very early on (he was a huge horrible dick, but I could tell extremely early on that this was so and did not have the benefit of knowing him for more than a decade), and I very nearly put the book down at that point, honestly. The whole scenario read like extremely stupid teenage drama, and I was unimpressed with everyone involved.

I don't really want to say Lily grew on me, exactly, but I did learn to tolerate her. I loved the magic, though the explanation for quite a few things is really left out until practically the end of the book, and then mostly what we learn is that there is something to learn.

I'll be picking up the next book to find out what happens, and for a bit more of this world that both is and is not ours. I'm hoping by that point Lily will have grown into herself a bit and I will find her less pathetic. I'm hoping for that, though I'm not precisely holding my breath. The world itself, though, is worth putting up with quite a bit.

This was a very clever idea not well executed.

The entirety of the book appears to be building towards something. We are slowly piecing together (way too slowly, I admit, but hey, I can forgive slow burns if they make it to the point where they become fascinating) what on earth happened, and there is an intriguing concern over memory and how it can lie and trick people.

I won't spoil the ending, not just because I don't do that, but because, in practice, there is no ending to spoil. I have no clue what the point of the book was, really, given nothing was resolved, everything is still a huge horrible mess, and I still have no clue what to believe regarding the missing girl. It's not even that it was left a little up in the air so that the reader could decide themselves. There is no resolution. For anything. There are a huge number of issues and confusions that surface throughout the novel, and in the end none of them are handled.

We have a crop of relationship issues between the characters that have no resolution and are actually not even addressed. We have some confusion over memory which is not handled, and the reasoning behind the confusion of memory is also not handled.

The characters themselves were not terribly interesting without any resolution to what was going on, honestly. They were kind of broken, which is okay if we get something that explains why or fixes it or does something besides leave them broken throughout. There is absolutely no reason to read it, really, since there is no growth, there is no change, there is just stacks of problems that remain there at the end. Not interesting problems, most of them, either: just everyday run-of-the-mill issues that are never handled.

I went in with low expectations for this book, honestly. I wanted to read a missing kid in the woods book for some (probably weird) reason, and this was available at the library. I saw it didn't have great reviews, but I figured hey, I'm interested in the subject matter, how bad can it be.

This bad. Last time I do this, I swear (ignore the fingers crossed behind my back. I know I will do this again.)

I honestly don't have much to say about this, which is fortunate because nothing I can think of to say is actually good or kind.

The prose was stilted, the dialogue atrocious, and the grammar questionable. I can actually overlook all of these issues sometimes if the story or stories are good enough, however. These were not.

They all felt pointless, climax-less, and boring. Occasionally a build-up was interesting enough that I found myself casually wondering how things would end. Generally, they didn't. I don't mean that the stories went on too long--I mean that they simply stopped. In some authors, this can be used to make you question and wonder and think. You want to solve the ending yourself, or continue with the characters. You want more.

Here, I was simply vaguely annoyed before I moved onto the next story, the only thing I was left wanting was something that made me not hate all of the stories. Hate is perhaps a strong word, the wrong word for the emotion I am trying to convey. Ennui is probably better. I paged through each story just hoping for there to be a single something that lit up the writing, the story, the characters, for a hint of something I could hang onto and enjoy.

I found nothing.

I may have accidentally finished the entire book in pretty much one sitting.

Now, admittedly, that's not terribly uncommon for me, but still, this was a lot of fun to read once I got into it.

I enjoyed the alternating viewpoints and the jumping back and forth in time. I was not expecting quite so much of this, and at one point when the viewpoint was on a character who was reading a diary of someone who was reading a diary, I did have to step back and go "woah," but it worked just fine and I didn't have any trouble keeping track of what was going on, though occasionally figuring out who knew what was trickier.

That's part of the fun of the book, though, personally. We, as readers, are much more aware of the history of things than the characters individually are, simply because we get to be in the heads (and reading over the shoulders) of all the characters. Each character has a piece of a very old puzzle, and putting them together was a lot of fun.

The characters themselves are interesting. I certainly didn't agree with all of their choices (we are not necessarily talking about good people all the time, here, and there is some weird stuff going on), but I was enthralled enough to overlook that. They were acting generally rationally given the information they had, and sometimes that's hard to pull off.

There were some twists I did not see coming, and I made a few wrong guesses along the way, which I always appreciate. Mysteries should not be totally obvious.

And this is a mystery, for all that "haunted house" seems to summon "horror". This is more Barbara Michaels-style than Stephen King, and I love that.

This appears to be the start of a series, which excites me, especially since there was a bit less "haunted house" in this one than I was hoping. I'll definitely be picking up the next ones, and I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I quite enjoyed this, but I do want to give a heads up for anyone who (like me, cough cough) did not know this: this is not just part of a series, it cliffhangers (is this a word? It is now.) really hard.

That's probably one of my main complaints about it, though it did take me a bit of time to get into it. Charlie and Silas were a little harder to connect to than I expected, given their circumstances. Charlie was especially tricky, and I found her first few chapters a bit a trudge through whining, but I did manage to settle in enough that I wasn't quite ready for things to be over when they were.

I do feel like the synopsis is one of those questionable ones. Maybe it works for the entirety of the story, but for what was contained in the novella I just read, it just didn't make sense. I was promised more than it delivered in terms of drama and answers, and I do kind of resent that, especially since I feel like it's coming--in the next novella.

Let's be honest, though--I'll probably read it. I don't think I'll buy it, because I am annoyed enough by the break and the shortness of it, but I'll probably read it. I'd like to know where their story goes, especially since now we're just barely starting to get some answers to at least some of the mechanics.

If you hate cliffhangers (not just series that are not complete, but genuine cliffhangers without any real finished plot arc), this might be a series to avoid until it is complete and you can read it all at once. So far, it seems worth it, but it is so hard to say at this point.

This wasn't bad, but unfortunately the concept was better than the actual book.

We're not really looking at a completely normal "Frankenstein" story, here, as should be evident from the synopsis of the book. This isn't a pieced together monster, this is a dead guy.

Also, the main character, Tor, is insane.

Mad scientists are kind of a trope that I admit to not being particularly fond of. Tor fits it to a tee, even better, perhaps, than Victor Frankenstein himself. She has absolutely no qualms about lying, torturing, and pretty much destroying lives. She's also extremely careless, which causes a large chunk of the problems in the book.

I don't generally fall into the camp of "you must like the main character to like a book," but I just don't quite care enough about Tor to have much interest in following her. She's unscrupulous without it being interesting, unscrupulous in a fussy way that keeps her so detached from her work and the reader that it is hard to get invested in what is going on at any point. Add to it that Tor herself causes pretty much all of the problems that need to be solved because she has some kind of God complex and also makes a crop of mistakes, and we've got a really awkward set-up as our driving force of the novel.

Owen is a much better friend than Tor deserves, and I regret that he wasn't the main character.

I was hoping to enjoy this more than I did, but this felt like Frankenstein with all of the moral questioning and actual feeling ripped out, and unfortunately that was what I enjoyed about the original.

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a cute, sweet little book about dogs.

The illustrations were quite lovely--I liked the style and the fact that each dog was shown slightly differently, which doesn't always happen in books about animals, or at least didn't back when I was super into them as a child.

Given the title, I have to admit I was hoping for a few more dog breeds (okay, let's be honest, I was hoping for a Cocker Spaniel like my girl, since that is clearly the best dog ever), but the ones there were well-represented in picture and prose and there was a decent selection of them.

All in all I enjoyed my foray back into the animal picture books I so enjoyed as a child and would recommend it to anyone interested in that.

This wasn't a terrible book, but it was not particularly well-written, nor did I find it scary.

I'll admit I'm out of the target audience (or at least target age-range) for this book, but I feel like I went in with pretty low expectations. I expected the writing to be below my level and the stories to be not exactly Stephen-King-scary, but I feel like this would have disappointed me even as a child, when I was devouring any kind of scary ghost-related book I could get my hands on.

The stories were supposed to be true, and I won't speak to that because all ghost stories are supposed to be true, that's the fun part of them, but they didn't feel real. The writing was clinical (I was not surprised to discover he wrote a lot of children's science books) and not descriptive enough to scare. It felt like the author couldn't decide whether to write it as a plain facts history of these hauntings or as a book intended to scare, and thus wavered between the two and fell short of both quite badly.

What saved this from being a total disaster was the choice of hauntings, which were well-selected and included some I had not heard of, which is always nice (the number of times I've re-read stories about the same ghosts is kind of annoying). It was a quick read, however, and introduced me to a few new stories I might track down more information on, so it was not a complete waste.