Bewitching

Title: Bewitching

Author: Alex Flinn

Rating: 5 stars

Summary: Bewitching can be a beast. . . .

Once, I put a curse on a beastly and arrogant high school boy. That one turned out all right. Others didn’t.

I go to a new school now—one where no one knows that I should have graduated long ago. I’m not still here because I’m stupid; I just don’t age.

You see, I’m immortal. And I pretty much know everything after hundreds of years—except for when to take my powers and butt out.

I want to help, but things just go awry in ways I could never predict. Like when I tried to free some children from a gingerbread house and ended up being hanged. After I came back from the dead (immortal, remember?), I tried to play matchmaker for a French prince and ended up banished from France forever. And that little mermaid I found in the Titanic lifeboat? I don’t even want to think about it.

Now a girl named Emma needs me. I probably shouldn’t get involved, but her gorgeous stepsister is conniving to the core. I think I have just the thing to fix that girl—and it isn’t an enchanted pumpkin. Although you never know what will happen when I start . . . bewitching.

Review: I've read all of Alex Flinn's fairytale retellings, and this is by far the best. I could barely put it down, and I was actually surprised by the ending. That almost never happens because many books are really predictable, even the good ones.  I didn't figure out who was Cinderella until around the middle of the book, and the ending took a twist I could never have seen coming. Flinn set it up so that everyone thought it would end like it does in so many other books, but then it was BAM! And to put in perspective how astonishing this was, picture those things where you put a coin in this side ramp and it goes down and spins around until dropping into the hole in the center. Imagine that you are the coin. You think that you're going to be dropped straight down the hole, but instead you go to Swirly Land. I wished it was more about Kendra, though. That's what the summary makes it seem like, but in reality it starts off with talking about Kendra's past, then becomes Emma's narrative interspersed with notes from Kendra. Moving on to Lisette: I hate extremely evil characters that were designed to make the reader hate them, because they do all this horrible stuff and I just want to go into the book and slap them. But all I can do is read about their evil deeds and get angrier and angrier with them. Back to the awesomeness of the book: There's going to be a whole series! YES!!!