Review: Kill Me Softly by Sarah Cross

 
Publisher: Egmont
Pub. Date: April 10, 2012
Source: Library
Format: Paperback
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Fairy Tales
Rating: 2 Stars
Mirabelle's past is shrouded in secrecy, from her parents' tragic deaths to her guardians' half-truths about why she can't return to her birthplace, Beau Rivage. Desperate to see the town, Mira runs away a week before her sixteenth birthday—and discovers a world she never could have imagined.

In Beau Rivage, nothing is what it seems—the strangely pale girl with a morbid interest in apples, the obnoxious playboy who's a beast to everyone he meets, and the chivalrous guy who has a thing for damsels in distress. Here, fairy tales come to life, curses are awakened, and ancient stories are played out again and again.

But fairy tales aren't pretty things, and they don't always end in happily ever after. Mira has a role to play, a fairy tale destiny to embrace or resist. As she struggles to take control of her fate, Mira is drawn into the lives of two brothers with fairy tale curses of their own . . . brothers who share a dark secret. And she'll find that love, just like fairy tales, can have sharp edges and hidden thorns. (Goodreads)

Being the lover of fairy tale stories that I am, I had high hopes for this book. Mira runs away from her two godmothers to go to the town where her parents died so she can find their graves. As the story continues we learn that many of the people in that town (the people who Mira get' caught up with) were cursed. All of their curses are from old fairy tales or folk tales. The main characters in the book will all one day do the same things as the fairy tale characters they were cursed as (like the girl cursed with the snow white curse will eat and apple and fall asleep and a guy will be the woodsman and try to cut out her heart). The concept was really cool, I liked that instead of the characters actually being the fairy tale characters, they were just cursed with... I guess you would call them attributes of their fairy tale counter parts.

Like I said the concept was cool, but I couldn't connect with a single character. I found myself reading, then just staring at a page because I just couldn't connect. I don't know, maybe it's just me. Mira is really freaking annoying, and ungrateful, and I didn't like how she just accepted that they were people running around with fairy tale curses, but she couldn't accept the fact that the guy she was falling, a 20 year old man to her 15 named Felix, for was no good. None of it made any sense. I had such high hopes and they were dashed. I'm going to go read Cruel Beauty now to clear my mind.