Honestly not sure I can milk 250 words out of this one. Forest of a Thousand Lanterns didn’t really spark my attention back when it first came out, but when Read Harder wanted me to read a retelling by an author of color, this was on one of the lists I looked at, and picking YA fantasy seemed a good idea at the time. And honestly, it wasn’t bad, I just didn’t find it interesting, at all.
It doesn’t help that I didn’t realize this was a villain origin story, and those almost never work for me. This is a rough retelling of Snow White in an East-Asian setting, but the main character is the Evil Queen. I just don’t find it engaging to read about a person going bad, especially if it’s done as shallowly and predictably as this was (I’m sure there are exceptions; I do quite like Breaking Bad). I would probably be fine if someone made me read the sequel, but it honestly sounds like a waste of time.
If you held a gun to my head right now, I don’t think I could remember the names of a single one of these characters. I would be dead. Shit, I still need twenty-nine words. Now only twenty-three. Twenty. I will stop cheating now to pad out this review but that is only because I have now reached the word limit, plus five.
Read Harder Challenge 2020: Read a retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, or myth by an author of color.