Information
Goodreads: Snow White Lucks Out
Series: Grimmtastic Girls #3
Source: Library
Published: June 2014
Summary
Snow White knows that her friends no longer trust her now that they have discovered her stepmother Ms.Wicked is a member of the E.V.I.L. Society. Still, she has so many luck charms that she simply has to trust everything will turn out all right. But when her favorite lucky charm goes missing, will she have the strength to stand up to her stepmother?
Review
Each Grimmtastic Girls book presents the story through the eyes of a new character and this has proven a rather exciting technique. It allows the authors to bring out the characters in different ways, as seen by various individuals, as well as to play with the type of story they write (the bold Red, for example, played with a dangerous romance while the more straight-forward Cinda simply toward her one goal–to find friends). However, this also means that readers will most likely find they have preferences–they will relate to or like some characters better than others and thus may find that they enjoy certain installments of the series more than others. In this case, I found that, although the plot still engrossed me, Snow did not capture me the way Cinda and Red did and thus the third book in the series is so far my least favorite.
Snow has a more timid disposition than either Cinda or Red who, although they possess insecurities and fears, largely forged ahead anyway. Snow, in contrast, spends a lot of her time thinking about everything that worries her, from doubts about her appearance to whether her friends still like her. It is, of course, understandable that Snow would behave this way. Her stepmother, after all, emotionally abuses her, constantly criticizing her and insulting her, and even trying to sabotage her so she looks foolish in front of others. Still, I wished she could find time for more interesting thoughts than, “Do my friends like me?” for the twentieth time.
The plot of her book also seems rather quiet. The romance is more subdued–actually more of a casual friendship than a romance since Snow and her prince interact very little and Snow seems not to recognize her own feelings. The personal aspect of the plot is barely a plot point at all–where Cinda had to find friends and Red had to find courage, Snow has to find…her missing lucky charm? The title of the book suggests Snow learns to rely on herself, but the story itself doesn’t bother to focus on that too much, except for the moralizing bit at the very end. As for the mini quest–its importance to the overall plot isn’t quite yet clear. Altogether, little seems to have happened to drive the main plot forward, though by the end enough has been set up for book four to make large advances.
The most memorable part of the book ended up being, for me, not Snow or the search to find the missing artifacts or anything one might consider important, but rather the randomness of the dwarves. Cinda and Red’s stories flowed naturally into the overall structure of the series, but the authors seemed uncertain how to place Snow’s tale in a boarding school setting. After all, she’s not running away so she can’t meet dwarves and live with them, and her stepmother is a teacher at the school and not likely to murder her on the premises. The dwarves were thus obviously squeezed in just because they “had” to be there, not because they made sense in the context of the plot and they disappear as arbitrarily as they came. Truly, this book is the weakest in the series so far.
Even so, I still enjoyed Snow’s story and was pleased to go on another adventure with her and her friends. Next up is Rapunzel’s tale and, since she has been the most mysterious of the four protagonists so far, I look forward to getting to know her.
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