ARC Review: Gretel and the Dark

Gretel and the Dark
Author:  Eliza Granville

Publication Date:  February 6th 2014   

~An Advance Readers Copy was provided in exchange for an honest review~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gretel and the Dark is Eliza Granville's dazzling novel of darkness, evil - and hope. Vienna, 1899.

Josef Breuer - celebrated psychoanalyst - is about to encounter his strangest case yet. Found by the lunatic asylum, thin, head shaved, she claims to have no name, no feelings - to be, in fact, not even human. Intrigued, Breuer determines to fathom the roots of her disturbance.

Years later, in Germany, we meet Krysta. Krysta's Papa is busy working in the infirmary with the 'animal people', so little Krysta plays alone, lost in the stories of Hansel and Gretel, the Pied Piper, and more. And when everything changes and the real world around her becomes as frightening as any fairy tale, Krysta finds that her imagination holds powers beyond what she could have ever guessed . . .

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Say hello to my little friend...

Joking.

I'm not friends with this book. So...

Say hello to my first ramble review. Meaning, where I talk most about...nothing, than the actual book. Out of all of the books I've reviewed since I started reviewing, this one right here is the problem. It's not like it's a 5 Star that I can't stop talking about and fangirl over, or a 1 star that I absolutely couldn't stand or hated, because I really didn't care that much about it. It's not even the in-between where it was perfectly fine, the characters weren't stand outs but they weren't annoying, the plot wasn't simple, but it wasn't the best you've read. It's not even that, it's...And then I come across this, and out of all the ones I've reviewed Gretel and The Dark is all on it's own. I really wanted to like it, I did, I mean, I had an ARC that came with a huge lollipop and everything looked pretty and  I just wanted to like it.

To be perfectly honest I don't know how I feel about it. It was a hard read, more 'sophisticated' than I was used to, but it wasn't even that, it was just...confusing. And dark, and twisted, and in a way, especially certain scenes, perverse.

Okay, I don't even know what to even contemplate to say anything about this, except for how I felt when reading it. Since I couldn't get into it at all, and then by the end I really didn't even know what I'd just read., hell for most of it I didn't even know what I was reading, and had serious issues with it.

One being, it's misleading, the whole book is misleading, and I wasn't expecting it to be about what it was about. I'm probably making no sense, but yeah, that's how I felt when reading it.

It didn't make sense.

It's hard to review it when everything's so boringly layered into something that even the littlest of thing could ruin the whole story, which I'd love to do for you, to save you the time, but I suffered 9 days of this, misery loves company , you guys. Through all of it, all the build up I thought it was going to be something huge, that it'll blow your mind, because there had to be something. It fell flat.

I'm not rating it, since it's really not my type of book, but would be others. So, instead I'll sum it up in one.