This was a mostly proverbial middle grade read. Filomina is a bookish middle school girl with no friends and overprotective parents. She’s obsessed with the Never After book series, supposed to be the “real” versions of all of the world’s most famous fairy tales. But on the day that the final book in the series is supposed to come out, she learns that it never will–and the author has gone missing. Soon, she encounters the main characters from the novel (Jack, as in Jack the Giant-Killer, and his sidekick), and finds that she’s become a character in the final book.
I felt like all the characters were caricatures, which made it hard to care about them. The “real version of fairy tales” trope has been done a lot, as has the mash-up of many different fairy tales in a single story, though there were a few unique twists. I won’t read on in the series, but it was engaging enough that I finished this one.
My rating: ***
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
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