“Once Again” by Liz Braswell

Once Again: Once Upon A Time Omnibus Snow/Beauty Sleep by Liz Braswell

I am truly disheartened to have to share a poor review on such a book who’s title enticed me from the bookstore shelf. I haven’t had much bad luck at finding “let down Disney remakes.” This however is finally sharing the shelf with “Beast” which I had finished just a few months ago with similar disappointment.

For starters, the first part of this book, “Snow,” seems to have been crammed into 264 pages. The plot contains a few large holes, undeveloped characters, and the story having taken several unexpected and incomprehensible turns. Snow’s mother died after childbirth, causing her father, the king, to resent her for causing his beloved’s death. Of course, like the story goes, he remarries a witch. But the twist that Braswell gave on this book is that she isn’t so much as a witch, she is more an experimenter/mad scientist. The Queen is overly obsessed with providing the king a child for him to love. But as some believe her dabble in the dark magic has cursed her from the inside preventing her from baring a child. She conducts a series of experiments on herself and creatures to find a way to bare a child. She sends herself into an insanity fit of rage, also thanks to the help of the asshole king who belittles her and says awful things due to her inability to produce him a child. When she finds she has exhausted all other spells and experiments, she decides to kill Snow and use her heart on an experiment that will surely produce a child for her. Of course, Snow escapes and stumbles upon the dwarves….

But the 7 dwarves Snow White meets are in fact not dwarves, but the “creatures” that the evil queen had conducted experiments on in the beginning of her time within the castle. These creatures include a cat/girl, a rat that is the leader of the misfit creatures, a few others I cannot remember off the top of my head, and of course, the Raven/boy whom Snow falls in love with. Now years pass, and the long pages describing Snow’s growing friendship with these creatures is extremely pointless and my main frustration of why the ending is so sped up and ends too quickly. Finally, the evil queen discovers where Snow is hiding and sets up (of course) a devious plan to disguise herself as an old woman and trick Snow. She plays the card of “oh your step mother feels awful and is staying in this inn and wants to apologize to you…” so Snow heads to the inn one morning to see the evil queen. Long story short, the evil queen pricks Snow’s finger on some weird steam punk-like

I will be honest, I had only gotten 10 pages into “Beauty Sleep” and decided to call it quits. I am not one for giving up on a book (if you look at my currently reading shelf you will notice a book that has been on there for a few months now), but given the fact I am more than halfway through this book and still am unable to get into it, I feel it is time to shift my attention to other books sitting on my to-read shelf.

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