How to Break an Evil Curse promises a land devastated in magic that will sweep you away in its horrific fantastical land of betrayal and adventure; except, the novel does not fulfill its promise at all. Unfortunately, this novel has been marketed as YA when the writing narrative comes across childish and immature. I had a hard time connecting with any of the characters and instead found myself annoyed by the forced satire. While it seemed that Morrison was trying to write a humorous satire on epic fantasy, the narration lacked the ease of satire that I, as a reader, wanted. While some readers may enjoy the quips, I found them to be quite asinine in nature and could not enjoy the characters or adventure being portrayed.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really wanted to like this book and took an issue with the tone more than the content.

The book read like it was trying to hard. It was at times funny, but between the footnotes and narrator that seemed to be more focused on what sounded funny than telling a story I didn't particularly enjoy the read. I can see how younger readers could get into this pace and maybe take the time to read the jokes and humorous context added in the footnotes but to me they felt out of place.

The story its self was unique. It was a bit confusing initially that we'd be introduced to a character and get their backstory and then move on to someone else. I was also pretty surprised by the ending. After all of that it felt like a rush and a bit of a letdown.

While not for me I can see why others would enjoy this light read.

I received this ARC via Netgalley and Black Spot Books, in return for an honest review. This is marketed as a YA adventure, but Ms. Morrison seems to be missing that target audience while not effectively hitting an older audience (where I fit in). There were things I liked very much, such as the use of ghosts to teach the young princess as she grew (and was kept away from the sun). That showed clever adaptation to the fantasy genre. The footnotes weren’t helpful and didn’t match the character of the book. Is the book meant to be snarky/tongue-in-cheek or is it meant to be a true fantasy novel? I realize that humor is the hardest thing to write so definite kudos to Ms. Morrison and Black Spot Books for this robust attempt. Please, before releasing this, consider doing a major review in light of what audience you’re actually trying to reach and the ARC feedback. I completed about 50% but couldn’t make it to the end. Ms. Morrison has obvious originality and I look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.

Great premise but not for me. I think it might be mismarketed as YA tbh. Read more like the older end of mid-grade fiction. I'm afraid I wasn't a fan of the style and the humour rather missed its mark. I'm clearly not the target audience but none of my expectations going into this based on the marketing were met. So maybe it's also been 'mis-shelved'?

Oh yikes, it's gotta be a no from me chief. It reads super young and archaic which I'm sure appeals to many people, just not to me. Thank you for the ARC.

How to break en evil curse, loved it! Draws you in right off the bat and the twists throughout the book keep you turning the pages. The only thing I didn’t enjoy was the little side notes you had to click throughout the book to get more information . While it helped with some parts mostly it just took time from reading the book to get information. About a passage

Thank you to the publisher for providing me a copy of this book through Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.
Unfortunately I couldn’t appreciate the book as much as I thought I would and ended up DNFing the book at 20%, although I really enjoyed the first chapter I was unable to make a connection with the main character and the story.

My best way to sum up what I did read of this book would be corny. It just came across more as a middle grade novel in the language that was used by the narrator. I think that this might do better categorized for middle grade (though I'm not sure about later content and romances since I DNF'ed this book pretty early). I also thought the book was more of a tell and don't show when it came to descriptions of the setting. Overall, I feel like this book does need some editing to cut down on a lot of extra descriptors.

What orginally drew me to this book was the stunning cover and interesting synopsis. I DNFd this book at 12%.

Now don't get me wrong, I didn't enjoy this book but others might. I understand that the reading demographic for this is a younger audience than myself and as a result think that pre teens and younger teens might enjoy this. I believe that the plot and writing style would be better for someone of this age group (10-14). I found the writing to be very simple and not overly complicated, some sentences in the book didn't need to be in it at all, for example "wherever there was a place that would benefit from a nice pillar or a bit of carving, there was a nice pillar or a bit of carving."
The change of perspectives is a bit confusing. I never knew whose perspective I was reading from and it took me a long while to finally grasp who point of view I was reading.

Though I DNFd this, I'd give the book 2 stars using the review method CAWPILE.

Though this book wasn't for me, I'd recommend it to a younger audience

I went into this with the notion it was high fantasy. After a few paragraphs, I realized it wasn't, so I sat it down and came back to it with the mindset of middle grade fantasy and then I was off to the races. It has a quirky charm with a narrator that tells you the story, which I think works well for a younger audience, but holds a reader looking for an immersive tale at arms' length.

The plot is fun and there is enough setting laid out to give you a good idea of the world you are entering. It's a world of exaggeration, where characters are larger than life in all ways. If they are villainous, they are extremely villainous, the good are so good, and the royals, well, they are as obnoxiously royal as one can be. Of course with my weak spot the villains, I was all in for Farland. The plot and the curse itself are also over the top and the end leaves plenty of room for another part with things left unanswered.

If you are looking for a fantasy with quirky humor and larger than life characters this is a fun read that will quench your thirst.

I was given this to read through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

This book just didn't work for me. The first chapter was promising and I thought I was going to really enjoy it. It all went downhill however from that moment on.

The humour came across as desperate and forced. At first, I thought it was witty but very soon after I realised that it was too much and a bit farcical. It was written almost as if Monty Python had rewritten a fairytale and for me, it just didn't work. Lots of the jokes made me roll my eyes and ended up being annoying rather than humourous.

The characters themselves were all very one dimensional, stereotypical of the roles they had (i.e the king was arrogant, the evil sister, etc.) and I hated the majority of them. I'm not sure whether this was due to the number of characters and so there was just no time to fully develop them but there didn't seem to be any sort of growth with any of the main characters.

Something within fantasy novels that is important for me is the world-building and descriptive writing, once again the author trying to add humour into every moment where humour wasn't needed has ruined this. Describing the castle the author has written: "Wherever there was a place that would benefit from a nice pillar or a bit of carving, there was a nice pillar or bit of carving." This didn't come across as comical to me but lazy instead. And because of this obsession with trying to make every moment humourous, I found it difficult to imagine any characters or scenes apart from the bog-standard fairy castle or village.

Unfortunately, I DNF'd this read when we got to Captain McManlyman as I was just finding the whole thing very silly and annoying.

All in all, I liked what the author was trying to do, but the balance just wasn't there for it. There needed to be more variety to balance the funny moments with serious ones.

I try to always read ARC from start to finish. I have been reading this book for three days, and I'm not even a quarter of the way through it. I can't do it; I can't even bring myself to hate read this. There's no train wreck syndrome or anything. I just don't care and, to make it worse, the author didn't seem to care about writing a good book. There are way too many characters too quickly introduced (at least 13 characters in the scant amount I've read). The author tries to write with a sarcastic, quirky tone; key word there is tries. It just ends up sounding like she doesn't care about the book or what's happening to her characters. That's not even going into all the anachronistic elements just randomly thrown in for what I think is supposed to be an attempt at humor. It doesn't work. The whole thing is just a mess, and there's better literature out there for me t

This is a really fun and funny book. I enjoyed the narrator; their snarky commentary really appealed to my sense of humor and I appreciated the more detailed background information and history they filled in. The main characters were well written and I appreciated their strengths and their flaws both were utilized well to move the story forward and made the characters likeable and fun. The overall concept of the curse being kind of ridiculous and the King, and subsequently many aspects of his kingdom, being out of touch and old fashioned added some fun to the classic fairy tale tropes.

The high fantasy designation in the description did lead me to expect a more serious story but the writing style made it quickly apparent that this is a lighter read though it does still touch on some serious elements including sexism, classism, and political structures. This difference did not bother me as I still really enjoyed the overall concept of the story and appreciated the narrative tone. I did however find that it felt like some threads of the narrative were dropped as the book reached its conclusion. I was left wondering about the fates of a few of the secondary characters that I had thought would be important to the ending of the story or to the main characters. There are some elements of the story that were clearly leading into being resolved later in the series but I’m not sure if that was what was happening with these characters or if their part in the story is over. Overall all though it is still a very fun read, I think the writing is accessible enough for readers at the younger end of YA or even older middle grade readers while still being entertaining for older readers who love a new twist on a fairy tale setting.

Thank you to the publisher for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

This one wasn't really for me. I felt like I lacked something in the connection with Juliana. She was a bit bland in my opinion and turned out to be quite annoying. I kept hoping for some character development but sadly was disappointed with the characters just developing the annoying trait.

The plot is pretty basic. I mean the title literally states the plot. It's basically a quest to find out how to break an evil curse. However once I started reaching the end of the story I felt like there was a lot missing. We read this whole book or at least I read this whole book to hopefully have a banger of an ending. However I thought the ending was quite anti-climactic which was very sad.

Now I do wanna say this. I do think this story has a lot of potential and I did like half of it so hence why it's not 1-star. Many others could possibly very much enjoy this story and that's what's wonderful about books. They are interpreted differently and that's what makes them so great. This one I sadly couldn't enjoy as much.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a digital ARC of How To Break an Evil Curse in exchange for an honest review.

While I appreciate what How to Break an Evil Curse was trying to do, I feel like it failed in execution. While reading I kept being so sure I was reading some kind of satire that was going over my head but based off of this book's description as "the first book in a high fantasy series" I doubt that's the case. I know I talk about marketing too much and it drives people mad but advertising this book specifically for it's almost sarcastic interpretation of your run of the mill curse story would definitely help it in the long run, especially considering the 'the first book in a high fantasy series' is a blatant lie. This is low fantasy. I'm not sure who classified it as otherwise but simply including potion wielding wizards and curses does not catapult a story to high fantasy. Not sure why that decision was made.

Let's talk about tone which is where the book fell short to me. How to Break an Evil Curse's opening makes it sound like your run of the mill old timey fairytale story, but occasionally our snarky modern narrator interrupts the narration to provide commentary which felt annoying at best, jarring at worst. At times it almost felt like she didn't believe the narrative itself was funny enough to stand on its own. I originally wasn't going to dock the rating that much because humour's subjective, but when it started slipping into character speech it was too jarring to ignore. Most of our snarky narrator comments come in the form of "since it's the past they didn't have/believe in x,y, and z" but then a page later characters are calling each other "Dude" and "bro". It was so perpetually confusing and I'm not sure what it was going for but whatever that was, it wasn't my cup of tea.

The cover is what pulled me to want to read this book but, unfortunately, it did not hold my attention. The premise was interesting, I love me an antihero(s), but this was just too everything. The little side notes of information was not needed. Honestly, I kept getting confused by all the povs constantly changing. Plus, everyone just ended up seeming not very intelligent. The dialogue between the characters was very juvenile as well. The evil characters were actually rooting for. The ending was quite unsurprising plus a blatant sequel “cliffhanger” that I’m not interested in figuring out. I wish it was more unconventional, that might have saved it for me.
Thank you, Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this early for reviewing purposes.

Unfortunately I have to DNF for now. I just couldnt get into the writing and the characters. I felt it could be going somewhere but I just cant wait around for It. Hope others enjoy it!

It starts in the land of Fritillary and takes you to different generations of family and points of views. There are two sisters it starts out that way and a wizard Farland. There’s Lillian and Mirabella.

Then there’s Juliana, Warren, mirabella, Lillian, Conroy Farland and many more on a interwoven adventure.

There are a lot of different points of views from different characters. There’s a lot of author commentary between each chapter as side note. Or also after notes between each chapter academic style.

I was given this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Okay listen, I am someone who is pretty generous when it comes to star ratings. A book doesn’t have to have much for me to like it but I am DNFing this book. I think it had a lot of potential but I couldn’t get past the writing & most of the time I was confused. Hopefully someday I can come back to this and enjoy it more.

The first thing that drew me to this book was the cover and the premise sounded interesting but I was disappointed by the execution of the plot. I feel like this book has so much potential but it didn't quite reach it, just falling short of being an excellent novel which was frustrating.

Here are my thoughts:
- As I said above, the plot had a lot of potential. I would describe this more of a low fantasy/fairytale-inspired book than how it is advertised which I think is the first mistake of the publishers. I went into this book expecting something completely different to what I got. This is not a high fantasy novel.
- Although many of the characters were dull and a bit one dimensional, (can we talk about how many characters there were????) again many of them had potential. I was mostly just waiting for some character development to occur but it never did. It was like watching a movie play out with no end. It left me unsatisfied. The characters started and ended pretty much the same.
- I'm not sure what the major issue was but I think so much more could have happened in this book. I hate being the type of reader who reads waiting for the climax of the story to happen and well, it just never did. Even the ending, which was likely the best part of the book, still felt oddly rushed and I was expecting more from it.

To summarise, I think if this was better planned out, the overall story would have reeked the benefits a lot more. I thought the premise had a lot of promise and I think Laura's writing is by no means bad. I just didn't get along with this book.
2.5 stars.
I received this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.