Five years ago I read my first Caty Callahan novel and fell in love with her stories which featured young people with wholesome values falling in love (the Bride Lottery and Marriage Lottery series). Then she came out with the Bride Lottery Fairytales series and I truly thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Recently a self-published novel from Jenni James was made into a film and although it’s really a D-rate movie I figured maybe the novel was worth trying. 🙁 I was wrong.
Jenni James’ Fairytale series is a series of romance novellas that are supposed to be take-offs of traditional fairytales. They really aren’t. In Not Cinderella’s Type the main character is a girl named Indy who lives with her single mom and is blissfully happy. Then her mother dies and she’s forced to go live with her rich aunt and uncle who give her a room in their attic and force her to clean and cook. First of all, that’s been done to death. Seriously. Even JK Rowling used that old cliche for Harry Potter who’s forced to live in a cubby under the stairs with his aunt and uncle after his parents die.
Second, Indy is an unlikable character. She uses people and expects to be rescued, which is often called the Cinderella complex for good reason. She’s not very nice to her friend. She’s certainly not nice to her aunt, uncle, or her cousins. Neither is her love interest the rich and popular Bryant. I think what disturbed me most was that Bryant took something from Indy that she could never get back and she forgave him practically immediately.
The writing was poorly done. I felt as though the author had copied and pasted the dialogue and scenes from other novels and inserted them into this novella with different names. The characters weren’t thought out very well and it’s clear the author hasn’t been a teenager in forever. I live with teenage girls. They don’t act this way. Ever. They don’t talk like this. Ever. In fact I couldn’t get any of the teenage girls in my house or their friends to read this novella.
0 out of 10 stars. I made it about halfway through this novella before I really couldn’t read any more of it. It’s that bad.
If you’re looking for a wonderful fairytale series of novellas, I highly recommend Caty Callahan’s Bride Lottery Fairytales series which you can purchase here. Caty Callahan’s series have been copied for a reason–they’re that good.
Reviewed by Erin.
Leave a Reply