Cloaked by Alex Finn
Cloaked
by Alex Finn
(Audio)
I read Beastly a few years back and liked it well enough. So when I saw this one on the shelves at the library just as I was finishing up the audio book in my car, I snatched this to earread. Like Beastly, this is a modern take on fairy tales, something I find interesting to read about. Unlike Beastly, this book is sort of a mash-up of a bunch of different fairy tales. There were only two I wasn't very familiar with.
It's the story of a young boy who works in his family's shoe repair shop. Money is tight, so when a beautiful princess enlists his help to track down her brother, a prince, who was turned into a frog, he agrees. Finding one enchanted frog in all the world is easier said than done, even with a few convenient magic objects he's given to help him out. He winds up running into a lot of enchanted animals (animals who were once humans) and other suspicious characters and having to help each one out in order to get the next piece of information he needs in his overall quest. So it's a series of small adventures as part of a greater whole. And all the while he's got his dreams of designing shoes for a living and marrying the princess (something his best friend, a girl, isn't too keen about).
A lot of the stories felt forced or rushed to me. The story was set up perfectly for "The Elves and the Shoemaker" but that story barely had a chance to play out and kind of fizzled away at the end. For a book that melds together about a dozen different fairy tales, though, I think it does a decent enough job.
I probably would have liked the main character more except I had a hard time liking the way the narrator read him. He always had a bit of stupidity to him for some reason when he spoke. Maybe it was the beach atmosphere bleeding through or the teenager part or both. But there were times I didn't care much about him and was just listening for the fairy tale story elements.
I do like stories with a warm and fuzzy happy ending. And though there was a lot of drama and many twists and turns, I was happy and satisfied with the way this ended. I'd called a couple of the twists, but that didn't mean I still didn't enjoy it overall.
A fun read. Not as good as Beastly, but a clever idea and fun to read.