Housekeeping Duties

I am finally, FINALLY finished moving interstate - the suitcases and boxes are unpacked, the fridge is stacked with edibles (and drinkables to celebrate), and I am having a relaxing afternoon on this here blog of mine to say howdy, and to mourn the passing of Once Upon a Week. Being the first year of Once Upon a Week, I can only hope that its popularity will continue to grow and I'll be able to do twice as many posts as this year about the awesomeness of fairytales.

Now I have to confess, my second book giveaway was supposed to be hosted a few days ago, however the removalist box it was in has been what I like to term elegantly as "smushed" and in doing so has wrecked the second giveaway prize beyond all reading recognition. Needless to say, I'm annoyed, but I'll be traipsing out to purchase another copy in the future. Just not right this minute. But don't worry - the Shannon Hale book is completely intact!

Anyhoo, I've got tons of book reviews to catch up on, so I'll get to it - thanks to everyone so far who has entered the Shannon Hale book giveaway, I can't wait to see who the winner is in a few days time!

x

Once Upon a Week Book Giveaway/ Contest!

My first ever giveaway! Hooray!

Hosting a giveaway during Once Upon a Week hints that the book relates to fairytales in some way...the lucky winner for this giveaway will receive one of my favourite reads this year:

The Book of a Thousand Days, by Shannon Hale!


This is a gorgeous fairytale about a very unlikely heroine, from the brilliant author of The Goose Girl. See my entirely favourable review for The Book of a Thousand Days HERE.

The winner of the giveaway will receive a completely new, unread paperback version. The cover is the same as displayed at the top of this post (isn't it gorgeous?!).

For all you Twilight fans, I notice on The Book of a Thousand Days cover, Stephenie Meyer refers to it as "My very favourite recent read".
But if you're not a Twilight fan, don't worry - I'm not either and I absolutely treasure this book!

To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment below, stating your email address!

The Rules: -

1. It's INTERNATIONAL! of course;

2. To enter, leave a comment replying to this post with a correct email address. Please notify me in your comment, if you are eligible for either or both of the following bonus entries:

+2 if you're already a follower, or you become a follower
+1 if you advertise this post on Twitter, Facebook etc (please post the link for me to find it.
Maximum of three advertisements per person, no more than one advertisement at any
one site);

3. Entries must be in by 5 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, 12 November 2009;

4. The winner will be drawn at random once entries have closed and been collated, and the lucky winner will be announced on this blog within 2 days of the competition closure, and emailed at the email address they have provided in their comment.

5. If the winner does not reply by email or notify me on this blog page within 72 hours of me sending email and posting winner on blog, an alternative winner will be announced.

Good luck to everyone, and stay tuned for my next giveaway posted in a few days time to mark the sorrowful end of Once Upon a Week!!! <3

Fairytales from a Fellow Blogger's Perspective: Sara from The Hiding Spot

Onward ho, Once Upon a Week!

Today we have the gorgeous Sara from the blog The Hiding Spot doing a little fairytale interview - Welcome, Sara!

1. Tell us a little bit about your blog.

The Hiding Spot is a book blog dedicated primarily to Young Adult titles. I occasionally will review adult science fiction and fantasy titles as well – sometimes I will read an adult title that I love too much not to share! I also interview authors and regularly hold contests and giveaways!

2. Do you read fairy tales or retellings often?

Not as often as I’d like! I really enjoy retellings, but I have a gigantic to-be-read pile, so I read a variety of books, some of which are fairy tales and retellings.

3. What is your favorite retelling?

My favorite retelling, so far is The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor. I consider Alice in Wonderland a fairy tale – it is probably my favorite one! My review can be read here!

4. Do you prefer the original tales or retellings?

I think it depends on the story. I really love the darkness of The Brother’s Grimm version of fairy tales, but I love retellings. I love when authors put a twist on a classic story that readers already know and love…

5. Are you a fan of Disney retellings?

Yes! I’d love to own all of the Disney movies! They bring back so many childhood memories and I’d love to be able to share them with my own children some day!

6. What Disney character is your favorite or which are you most like?

I think I’m most like Wendy from Peter Pan. We both are very practical and motherly, but love and are drawn to the idea of magic. My favorite would probably be Alice from Alice in Wonderland.

7. Who is your favorite Disney villain?

The Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. She’s completely insane! When I was little I dressed up as The Queen of Hearts for multiple Halloweens!

8. Which princess, either Disney or Grimms/Hans Christian Anderson, do you dislike and why?

I’m not sure that I have a very good answer for this question. I like all the princesses…

9. If you could choose to live in a fairytale for a day, which one would it be?

I’d love to live in Aladdin for a day. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of having my very own genie and I’d love to ride on a flying carpet!

10. If you were a princess who had won your own Prince Charming, what would your 'Happily Ever After' castle look like/consist of?

My castle would have plenty of spires and turrets! I don’t really think I’d care for a moat, but a hedge would be nice. I’d love if it was located somewhere like Scotland – overlooking the sea. There would be multiple libraries, a ballroom, and a huge bedroom with a ridiculously large bed. In fact, the whole room can just be a bed. There isn’t any need for the floor!

Book Review: Ice, by Sarah Beth Durst

Before I dive headfirst into the book review, I would like to say a big thank you to Sarah Beth Durst, who sent a copy of Ice to me herself, when she heard about my interest in the novel. Thanks again, Sarah Beth!

Ice is a fairytale set in the real world Arctic snow. Cassie, an eighteen year old having grown up in an Arctic station with her scientist father, has long wanted to join him in the study of the movement of the majestic polar bear across the icy territory. When Cassie, however, meets the Polar Bear King, everything she knows about her world is shattered, as the fairytale she was told as a young girl to explain her mother's death becomes a reality. So that she can see her mother again, Cassie pledges herself as a wife to the powerful beast, much to her disgust and hatred of the position the white bear king has put her in. But his world is unlike anything she has ever experienced, and what she learns as a prisoner in his castle will change her forever.

How to best explain Ice? It's like a well-crafted and sturdily-built snowman. Each piece of the story is something recognisable in itself, but when put with other pieces transforms into something entirely different. On a snowman, a smoothed snowball becomes a head, twigs resemble arms, a carrot is transformed into a perfectly sinister nose. When you break Ice apart, piece by piece, you find its body derives from the classic fairytale East of the Sun, West of the Moon; its true love message is entirely reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast; and the cold beauty of the described environment can be recognised only in a European Winter fairytale like The Snow Queen.
When all these elements are cast back together, however, Ice becomes an original, beautiful tale of a young woman's sacrifice and the risks she takes for love.

Durst has been an entirely clever seamstress in writing this novel. Known modern science and the mysteries of a timeless magic are patterned beside one another as if they have always existed as a pair. In order for a reader to suspend disbelief, the author is usually required to shift the characters into an alternate universe for the magic to occur. But by choosing the widely unexperienced but very real arctic territory as the story's environment, Durst maintains the mysterious beauty of an ice-covered fantasy world as well as injecting science into the storyline to ground the tale in reality.

The book is also fiercely romantic, strangely real and not without moral purpose, read in the context of a frightening modern world facing the extinction of polar bears. The environmental element of this novel leaves its pawprint embedded in every chapter, but never seeks to overshadow the novel's first and foremost purpose, as a traditional-style fairytale.

This is a wonderful book for an impressionable girl to read- the writing is clear, not fanciful, and Cassie is an incredibly strong and passionate heroine. She bases her tough decisions on love and isn't afraid to voice her opinion even where it puts her in danger. Her resourcefulness, sense of adventure and fierce independence sets her apart from the everyday YA protagonist swooning over the first bite of love. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, I am reminded of another strong-minded and resourceful protagonist when reading - Lyra Belacqua from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. The scene in book 1, Northern Lights where Lyra is on the back of the princely polar bear, the wind pulling at her hair and the northern lights ribboning through the sky - that intense freedom can be felt again upon reading Ice.

I was hoping to enjoy this fairytale, but I was emotionally moved by it as well. Polar bears are part of an icy royal court that may not be long for this world - it is incredibly sad to think that in all likelihood, the white bears will become a fairytale themselves before long. Prepare for the characters to gently slough about in your thoughts after you've turned the last page.

Being a frosty romance, I would recommend saving this book for a lonely rainy day where you can swamp yourself in cozy blankets and snuggle in with a cup of creamy and entirely satisfying hot chocolate.

And don't forget the marshmallows.

Rating: 4 frosty stars.

Eugenio Recuenco- Fairytale Photoshoot

Some of you may know that Eugenio Recuenco is one of my favourite artist/ photographers.

He did a fairytale shoot a while back which I really wanted to show you because I think it's superb. I adore fairytale photoshoots of any kind so I'll probably post some more later on in this Fairytale Week, so let's get the ball rolling... can you pick the fairytale?

Once Upon a Week...Begins!

IT'S HERE!! YAY!!

Once Upon a Week, as hosted by NotNessie at Today's Adventure, is Fairytale Week - *frenzied*

To get in on the action (how could I not? This week was MADE for me) I will be posting a review of Ice by Sarah Beth Durst tomorrow.

And who knows what I will choose to do after that? Something fun. Like... a COMPETITION. AND a fellow blogger FAIRYTALE-THEMED INTERVIEW. And...maybe another review.

Suffice to say, I will surely look back on this week fondly...haha, what a fairytale nerd I am.

Book Review: How to Catch and Keep a Vampire, by Diana Laurence

I have a confession to make. I love the vampire genre. Except for, funnily enough, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. The possessive romance is ok, but the writing is just...blah.

But I love almost everything else in the field, from the classic Dracula by Bram Stoker, to the cleanish The Vampire Diaries TV series, to the decidedly more dirty True Blood. And all those inbetween - Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn...the list is endless.

So you can imagine how much I wanted to like How to Catch and Keep a Vampire (uh-oh, the audience breathes - you know what's coming) - imagine my total dismay when I absolutely did not like it AT ALL.

The main idea of this book is a how-to guide on dating a vampire of your very own. The narrator is the author herself, Diana Laurence, and Diana sets about giving tips on how to snag a local vamp hottie, how to react when they ask whether they can drink your blood, and the most burning question of a vampire/human relationship - to convert or not to convert?

The vampire subjects of this book lean towards the True Blood species - they can drink synthblood (but human blood is more delicious, of course), and they have elixirs not only to spark up their skin tone, but also to walk around in sunlight hours. There's not really much that's bad for vampires, aside from not being able to view themselves in mirrors and being looked down upon by ignorant society for being "damned" ...their vampire tehcnology seems to make them superior to humans in every single way possible. Actually, I feel depressed being a lowly human right now.

Problem is, the vampires in this book are just plain caricatures of the new breed of sparkly vampires. There's nothing real about them. And there's nothing real about this book either. The chapters are interlaced with case studies which are supposedly friends of the narrator with real-life experiences of dating good and bad vampires, but all the friends sound the same - the stories, instead of being dark and dangerous, are yawnworthy suburban anecdotes about completely unrealistic situations, like the one where a vampire is in a garden strumming a guitar while squirrells sit hypnotised. Ummm...PUH-leeze (and I know that saying 'unrealistic' situations is kinda ironic when talking about vampires, but really, there's gotta be some sort of reality to make the situation semi-believable for the reader).

There are some semi-funny one-liners to this book - but most of the effort is wasted, as How to Catch and Keep a Vampire dissolves into boredom and nonsense. I wasn't sure whether it was a parody on the whole vampire thing or whether the narrator was for real about the vampire dating abilities. Either way it fell flat for me. And while I won't spoil the details of it for those who haven't yet been deterred from reading this book, quite frankly the whole 'red ribbon' device threaded throughout this vampire guide is a little bit try-hard.

Further, I found the writing to be a little confusing - the language itself appears to be geared towards a young adult audience with teen - twenty something slang terms like "effing" in wide usage throughout the book, but the vampires themselves seem more like 35-40 year olds rather than the perpetual 17 year olds that teens would usually be drawn to. I wonder whether perhaps it was a mistake not to have a teen protagonist if Diana was wanting to include the Twilight audience.

Now I know, courtesy of her website, that Diana Laurence has written some vampire books in the past, so it is difficult for me to comment either way about whether or not this has been yet another bid to cash in on the Twilight fame, while it lasts. Suffice for me to say that How to Catch and Keep a Vampire brings nothing new to the ever-increasing field of vampire books, rather, it makes the topic seem slightly too convenient - where are the vampire's weaknesses which makes them so lovable? It's like Superman without his kryptonite, Brad Pitt without his weakness for that she-devil Angelina, and this book is writing without Febreeze- it's stale and the topic has been wrung dry.

If you're really desperate for vampire lovin', you might be able to stomach this book, but I found it a bit of a time-waster meself. But hey, I'm in the minority I'm sure - I've seen tonnes of positive reviews around the web for How to Catch and Keep a Vampire.

I worry when I am so honest in a review to be on the brink of scathing - this is one of those times. I don't think the publisher/agent will ever send me anything again. Oh wells, can't win 'em all...

Rating: 1.5 stars.