The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: Faking Christmas Kerry Winfrey, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Whether Christmas in Connecticut is a holiday classic is debatable, but it has inspired several adaptations and remakes, including this one.   Premise: Laurel didn't mean to lie to her boss. She just really needed a job, and one misunderstanding spiraled out of control. Now she has to pretend that her sister's life is hers for one memorable Christmas.  You know what? I liked this one!  Laurel is funny and relatable. She's acknowledges that she's made bad decisions and is trying to do better, gets frustrated, wears her heart on her sleeve, and is fundamentally optimistic, despite also being hugely self-deprecating.  The best parts of Christmas in Connecticut (the banter, the humor and the fun characters) are largely intact, while the occasional sexism of the original is left behind. Laurel got her...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: It's a Fabulous Life Kelly Farmer, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Here's an obvious one.  Premise: It's a Wonderful Life, but cheap-Netflix-remake ready.  I've often been a bit of a cynic when it comes to It's a Wonderful Life, and this book didn't cure me of that.  To me it reads like a romance novel full of very standard modern-romance-movie tropes - Girl lives in small town, but wants to move to the city. Girl's high school crush moves back to town and they reconnect. Both get roped into helping with a town holiday festival. Minor drama as girl can't decide whether to stay in town with first love or strike out for dream life in city. Magic of Christmas makes girl appreciate her life in town and decide to stay with first love. The fact that both girl and first love are female just makes it a modern romance, not an untraditional one.  And act...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas. Book Review: Just Like Magic Sarah Hogle, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, and I think I read somewhere that this one was loosely inspired by the Grinch, but it's not a super strong connection.   Premise: Bettie had it all. She lost it all. She accidentally summoned a holiday spirit. Now she's got a one-way ticket back to the life she wants, unless she realizes she wants something else instead. I'll be honest, I almost quit reading this book. I hated Bettie. She was awful. She was useless. She was a self-pitying mess of a person who wasn't ever in any real trouble, despite the terrible decisions she'd made and things she'd done.  She was a mess partly because she'd briefly been a child star, but I didn't have any sympathy, because she was also a washed-up wannabe influencer who was trying to scam her way back into relevance rather than admit to her (extremel...

Seasonal crosspost from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: The Kingdom of Sweets Erika Johansen, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, starting with this very different take on the Nutcracker.  Premise: A party. A magical toy from a mysterious man. A trip to a wondrous land of sweets. Plus betrayal, torture, and death. Not a story for kids. So I have to admit that I was annoyed fairly early on in this book because it's a dark fantasy based on the Nutcracker, only it's about Clara's goth sister, and yet her name is NOT Marie. I mean, the idea of there being two girls was right there!  But no, the goth bluestocking sister is called Natasha. Natasha and Clara are twins, but Nat was supposedly cursed at their christening by Drosslemeyer, while Clara was blessed. Clara grew up beautiful and sweet, but a bit vapid, while Nat is spiky and awkward and reads books and learns the servants' names.  I was worried early on that ...