The Forest Grimm was amazing! There was so much amazing detail that really added to the story. This was also a story that was unpredictable and kept me guessing even though I was so sure I knew what was coming!

The Forest Grimm is a fantasy romance—with a twist on the Grimm’s fairytales. I thought the way the different tales were worked into the Little Red Riding Hood inspired main story was really clever and well done. The fantastical with an edge of creepy definitely lives up to the original Grimm’s vibe.

I liked the main characters and their interactions with each other and I found the writing style and world building really easy to get into which made for a quick, enjoyable read. I’m really looking forward to the next book after that cliffhanger epilogue!

The audiobook narration was great and made it so easy to get lost in the story!

**ARC provided by NetGalley (audio) and Goodreads (print galley) for honest review**

Fairy tale fans, this one's for YOU!!! The Forest Grimm by Kathryn Purdie is a twisty, dark, fairy tale retelling about Clara, a young girl who lives on the edge of a cursed forest, who desperately wants to go in and save her mother who's been missing for three years. She stumbles across a way to enter the forest safely and, with the help of her friends, begins a perilous journey fraught with familiar, and yet not-so-familiar, characters.

This was great. This had everything from spooky forests that move in the night, to magical flowers, to a unique and swoony romance, even a mystery. The pacing was great, the characters were well rounded and fleshed out and interesting, the setting was #readinggoals. I got exactly what I wanted from this story, my only sadness is that I didn't realize it was a DUOLOGY!!! Luckily, the second and final book, The Deathly Grimm, is said to come out in January, so we shouldn't have too long to wait!

The start of the book with Clara’s story was a captivating story. Towards the middle of the book it got a little repetitive. I did like the different take on fairytales. The ended wrapped up all the stories really well.

Thanks NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the early audio book to review!

This book had everything I love in a good story: a magical world, friendship, family, newly discovered love, a problem to be solved. The Forest Grimm is not a simple task. It’s a magical forest that has reveled against the people of Grimm’s Hollow. Someone has used the special magic for ill purposes and the forest refuses to accept people, except for the few who go in and never come out.

The MC, Clara, is kind and selfless. She does anything she can to save her mother, the first of those lost. The family bonds were so heartwarming and pure. The romance was well balanced and untainted in the story. It was so refreshing!!!! I love seeing romantic relationships that show love and respect without needing to be graphic. Thanks you Kathryn Purdue for this amazing tale. And thank you to Sarah Ovens for a brilliant performance. I loved everything about the Forest Grimm and can’t wait for the next part of the story!

Overall 3.5 rounded up for me.
If you enjoy fairytale retellings you will love this book. It does a great job of mixing the fairy tales into the adventure of finding their lost people in the forest.
If you are a 100% happy ending kind of person this may not be for you, I personally enjoyed that not everything played out in a predictable way and not everything was tied up with a pretty bow at the end.
The audiobook was enjoyable and overall the main character was likable if not a little naive (but that ok when you consider her age).

I loved the way Kathryn Purdie combines different fairy tales in this fantasy best suited for tweens and young teens. The author has done a great job creating a spooky atmosphere and a suspenseful plot that held my interest and kept me guessing. The story emphasizes the importance of family and friendship, while also featuring a very sweet, slow-burn, friends-to-lovers romance.

Our main character Clara can be frustrating with her stubbornness and sometimes-foolish decisions, but she means well and her actions are consistent with her personality and values. I liked the way her disability (scoliosis) was incorporated into the story. I loved Axel, and appreciated that all of the characters learn and grow over the course of the story.

I was disappointed that we are left with so many unanswered questions. We never learn who committed the murder that triggered the curse in Grimm’s Hollow, nor why the Forest Grimm affects the villagers in the peculiar way it does. I can only hope that the answers will be provided in the sequel that is expected to be published in early 2024.

The audiobook production was excellent. I loved the narration by Sarah Ovens. She has a pleasant voice and accent, good pacing and pronunciation, distinctive voices and speech patterns to suit each character, and she is able to convey mood and emotion effectively. The story works very well as an audiobook.

I received a free advanced review copy of the ebook and audiobook through NetGalley. I volunteered to provide an honest review.

I love reading fairy tale retellings but a lot of times reimaginings don’t have that wonderful folktale feel I crave in this type of story. That is not the case with The Forest Grimm. This felt like I was reading a cozy, yet eerie tale that would not be out of place being told by a medieval hearth.

I appreciate how the author wove together various classic tales into one story, but not in a super obvious way. It never felt disjointed and I enjoyed trying to decipher which tale would be represented next. I quickly became invested in the characters and really liked how the author showcased many different types of relationships and how they each impacted the MCs throughout the book.

Read this if you enjoy fairy tale retellings or your cottagecore books a little on the dark side. If you loved the 2005 movie, The Brothers Grimm, starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger you should add this book to your TBR ASAP!

This was a super cute book and I am not really into fantasy...and now I want to know what happens in the next book! This was my 1st book by Kathryn Purdie but it will def not be my last! I love that the bad ass in the book is the young girl and she is doing most of the rescuing and fixing!!

4.5 stars to an amazing new series. 17 year-old Clara just wants to save her mother from the dark Grimm Forest. The people of Grimm's Hollow were blessed w/ a Book of Fortunes and yet, somehow, someone still used it for a horrible purpose. Now Grimm's Hollow is being punished over and over again for the misuse of the book and anyone who tries to enter the Forest, disappears. Clara is determined to get her mother out. Together, with her best friends Axel and Henny, who also lost someone close to them to the Forest, she discovers a way in. But the Forest changes those who enter it. And there are more dangers than they know hidden in the Forest Grimm.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this audio e-arc.*

3.5 stars!

While I liked all the fairytale elements of the story, I found myself getting lost as to what was going on or where the characters were. I like that the ending was kind of a cliffhanger and I would be curious to see what happens in the next book!

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

2.5⭐️

"Tell me again, Grandmère, the story of how I die."

We were promised a fairytale retelling and Purdie delivered with new twists on the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel and more. She has a very easy-to-read writing style which made the book easy to get through. Some of the imagery she invoked was also creepy as hell, which I ended up enjoying.

On the downside, I wasn't particularly compelled to know how it ended or to pick the book back up every reading session. I feel that fairytale retellings tend to all follow the same formula. Unfortunately, that's left me with nothing special to say about this one.

This is the kind of book that I'll likely forget next week and not be too upset about. Will not be picking up the sequel.

I would like to thank NetGalley for an audio arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What a great month for dark fairytale retellings. The Forest Grimm ended up being so much better than I thought it would, and I think it's why I hate the *spoiler alert* cliffhanger ending. I NEED BOOK 2!!

I didn't like Clara. At all. However, her and Axel worked well together and I loved watching them interact. The setting was intriguing, and between the cursed forest and the people they run into and their areas, it was absolutely intense. And that brings me to my favorite thing about this book: the fairytale characters. They were amazing. They were dark and gritty and absolutely terrifying. I couldn't get enough of it.

I highly recommend this book if you enjoy your fairytale retellings with a bit of a bite.

4.5 ⭐️

Cozy fantasy fairytale! This was such a good book that combines a ton of fairytales into a surprising twist. I honestly thought I had it figured out about halfway and I’m pleasantly surprised that I didn’t and I really hope there’s a second book!

If you’re a big fan of the Grimm brothers but don’t expect the tales word for word this is a great book!

i am a sucker for a dark retelling of already familiar stories. i really enjoyed the narrator and thought they did a great job of bringing the story to life. Unfortunately for me this novel tended to fall a bit short in a few places. There were a few places there the story seemed to bog down and then take off to the point where i would get lost. Some of the characters had a tendency to also be a bit confusing but over all i liked them and thought that their development was well done. Over all this was a really interesting retelling that i think a lot of people will enjoy.

The Forest Grimm by Kathryn Purdie
4.5/5 Stars
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

•••Spoiler free review below•••

I went into this expecting a Little Red Riding Hood retelling (based on the cover) but this story was so much more. The town of Grimm's Hollow has been cursed for seven years due to someone wishing for murder from the Book of Fortunes. The villagers have tried to make amends with the forest and will the book to come back and bless the town with no luck. Seventeen year old Clara is finally old enough to venture into the Forest herself in search of her missing mother. With the help of her friend Axel who is also missing a loved one, they take off on an adventure but soon discover the forest is alive and the townspeople that have disappeared into the forest are no longer the same. They come face to face with Rapunzel, Cinderella, Briar Rose, and more as the struggle to break the curse, save the town, and get there happily ever after's.

Read this book if you like:
- fairytale retellings with a twist
- ya fantasy with a dark undertone
- friends to lovers
- sentient forests
- strong friendships

The Forest Grimm will be released September 19th and if it's not already on your tbr, it should be!
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Special thanks to Wednesday Books for sharing a free copy with me in exchange for my honest opinions.

An interesting approach to intertwining classic fairytales all in one read. The Forest Grimm reveals itself as an unpredictable, deceiving and secretive place. This read will entice readers with many fairytale references while also spinning a story filled with curses, missing loved ones, determining one’s fate and much more!

Thank you NetGalley for the ALC.

I think this book was very creative in how all the fairytales were incorporated. I feel like there was something missing in the relationships of the characters, but I just can't put my finger on what it is. I think I wanted a little more from them. I listened to this on audiobook, and the narrator did a fantastic job! I want to thank NetGalley and the author for the chance to read the ARC of the Audiobook.

Nonsensical, aimless, and lacking in originality, <i>Forest Grimm</i> is a young adult fantasy set in a world of twisted fairytales.


<b>THE PLOT OF THE WANDERER</b>

The initial pages of <i>Forest Grimm</i> are engaging. Clara is an active protagonist, sneakily adding extra names to the lottery in an effort to be the villager chosen to enter the Forest Grimm. When that plan is thwarted and she discovers a plant that will protect her from the effects of the Forest Grimm, she tricks her grandmother into doing another tarot reading and then she sneaks out of the village in search of her mother, friends in tow.

The overall driving force of this story is Clara’s search for her mother, who is the first villager that went missing within the Forest Grimm years back. Clara engaging actively within the story to reach this goal was a promising start.

However, once Clara and her friends enter the Forest Grimm, this story falls apart. The very nature of the forest is that it shifts overnight, a la a Hunger Games arena crafted by the gamemakers themselves. Because the earth is always moving away from them, the three main characters spend the entire book lost and wandering aimlessly. They are no longer able to take an active role in the story as a result. The world and the plot are now being inflicted upon them, rather than the other way around.

It was at this point in the story that I began to realize Purdie wrote herself into a corner with this book. She started out so strong with such an active protagonist, just to let this one characteristic of the setting cripple all other elements of the story.

As a result, the only way Purdie could move the story forward was for her characters to just randomly stumble upon the missing villagers throughout their lost wander through the Forest Grimm. This was an incredibly clumsy way to progress the story, since it felt like a series of catalysts that had no real impact or bearing on each character’s transformative journey (save the run-in with Axel’s jilted bride that was taken by the forest last year).

Each of these catalysts felt more nonsensical and twisted than the last. While Purdie had a lot of cool ideas, the execution was poor. The following six encounters happened throughout the course of the novel in the Forest Grimm, and with each one, the issues are clear:

🧶 🎶<b>She’s got a dream, she’s got a dream…she just wants to see her dying victims scream.</b>🎶 Yep, you read that right. In this twisted fairytale, Rapunzel attempts to ligature strangle Clara and co. with her miles of hair. She ends up being one of the missing villagers, and her hair grew that much in just a couple years because…magic.

🐭 <b>Clara and co. get lit on Cinderella’s mushrooms.</b> Ella, Axel’s missing bride, goes by Cinderella now, and she drugs our gallant trio and then attempts to trick Axel into marrying her while he’s tripping on her shrooms.

👻 <b>A little ghost child advises three near-adults on street smarts.</b> Clara can see ghosts, and converses with the ghost of Axel’s long-dead child relative. He gives them very convenient advice that basically comes down to the fact that they shouldn’t trust anyone they come across. This seems like very obvious advice that three people in their late-teens should already know. Overall, ghost boy seemed like a plot device, and the flimsy reason that we’re given for why only Clara could see and interact with him didn’t work for me.

🍽️ <b>Hansel and Gretel are cannibals.</b> One of the villagers brought their twin children into the Forest Grimm, where they rapidly grew to the appearance of teenagers in just a handful of years, but maintained the minds of six year olds. All of this is of course because…magic. Oh, and they capture Clara and co. with plans to eat them.

🐺 <b>Grandma is a wolf.</b> In the world’s most anticlimactic, worst-kept twist, the wolf turns out to be controlled via magic by Clara’s grandmother and has thusly been protecting them all along. There is no effort to transform this very obvious use of the Little Red Riding Hood tale. As soon as I read that Clara wore a red cape and there was a wolf stalking them in the night, I knew it would be the grandmother.

🪡 <b>Sleeping Beauty is a vampire.</b> Clara’s untimely death foretold comes to pass when Briar Rose (Clara’s mom) convinces her to prick her finger on the spindle, and then when it weakens her, she takes Clara to a room of bodies where Henny is lying, and she then proceeds to drink their blood. She drains Clara, killing her. Axel finds them and drives the spindle into Clara’s heart, resurrecting her from the dead because The Magical Book told him to. Clara repeats the exact same methods on her mother, except her mother dies, the castle crumbles around them, and they have to flee, leaving her mother behind to be buried under rubble. I’m unsure what Clara’s thought process was behind using Axel’s resurrection procedure on her mother, who was alive. It worked on Clara because she was dead. How did she not imagine that stabbing her mother in her still-beating heart could have any other result than death? In this moment, Clara truly felt stupid. The logic was nowhere to be found.

So after that recap, it’s clear that a lot of my issues with the writing of each of these fairytale twists is that they are either nonsensical, rooted in a poorly constructed magic “system”, predictable because Purdie didn’t subvert the fairytale enough, or made her protagonists look foolish and dim-witted.


<b>THE THREE Cs OF ROMANCE: CRINGY, CLICHED, AND (anti)CLIMACTIC</b>

Axel and Clara’s romance did not work for me. The two are very obviously smitten with one another from the start. As lifelong friends, this is believable. However, the constant discussions about “trusting me with your heart” are worded so unnaturally and over-the-top that they are cringe-inducing. Additionally, all of the allusions to Axel being a prince come across as incredibly cliched and heavy-handed given the fairytale world we are dropped into.

As for the anticlimax of it all, the fact that Axel and Clara start the story in love and end the story in love (only having overcome the rather overblown and unconvincing obstacle of letting their walls down and allowing themselves to be together) felt very anticlimactic. I was not a fan.


<b>FINAL THOUGHTS</b>

This just didn’t work for me. The plot was aimless, the characters lost all agency once they entered the forest, and all of the fairytales were either predictable or poorly executed. Most of them lacked purpose in driving the characters toward transformation. Only (Cinder)Ella served that purpose. The rest just felt like diversions to fill up page space before the end.

I also don’t for the life of me understand why this ended on a cliffhanger. This is one of those books where it easily could’ve and should’ve been a standalone. The lack of meaningful progression in this story alone indicates to me that whatever material Purdie has left in her for book two probably should have been incorporated here somehow.

Ultimately, <i>Forest Grimm</i> needed a lot more editing before seeing the light of day, and I’m disappointed this is the state in which it’s being released to the world. It feels like such a massive disservice to Purdie that more rounds of editing weren’t recommended, considering some of her ideas felt cool at first glance (e.g. Vampire Sleeping Beauty, cannibalistic Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella the vengeful poisoner), but they didn’t work in the execution.


<b>AUDIOBOOK REVIEW</b>

Sarah Ovens’s performance is fantastic! She has a very charming voice that’s easy and nice to listen to. If you read this in any form, I’d listen on audio just for her narration.


<b>Overall Rating:</b> 1 star

<i>A big thank you to Netgalley and the publisher, Macmillan Audio, for providing me with an advanced copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review!</i>

Let me begin by saying that I have been in a HUGE book slump for the last 6 months, DNFing books left and right, and within one chapter this book fully cured it! My favorite author came out with a new book and I READ THIS ON RELEASE DAY INSTEAD! If that doesn’t show you how much I loved this book nothing else will! The writing in this Little Red Riding Hood Grimms retelling is absolutely BEAUTIFUL! Not only is it filled with magic, suspense, mystery, romance and all things Grimm, the descriptions of this world and its inhabitants paint such a beautiful scenery that will sweep you away entirely. I haven’t felt like this reading a book since I last read beloved books like Caraval, Once Upon a Broken Heart and Folk of the Air. If you’ve found yourself searching for that magic realm you will want to revisit again and again, LOOK NO FURTHER!

Our FMC Clara is immediately relatable, and oh so root for-able. She’s brave, determined, loyal and fierce, you can’t help but want to tag along on her adventure into the Forest Grimm in search of answers, and hopefully salvation for more than just her doomed village, as she herself is doomed, and has lost what is most important to her. She is not alone in her quest to save what she loves, as her friend Axel is also on a quest of his own to rescue his would be bride who went mysteriously missing in the forests depths. (If you listen closely you might recognize even more beloved Grimm retellings right in this one’s midst!) While it was a retelling, it was entirely its own, in no way just mirroring anything I’ve read before. It is filled with new twists and turns with characters we know and love, fully reimagined to make it singularly unique.

The plot is paced so well, with no lags or leaps and I was fully invested from start to finish. I was kept on my toes wanting to read faster to see what happens next because for once I wasn’t able to decipher the plots before they unfolded (which was such a treat for someone like me who consumes so many books that I often see things coming) For me this was an unputdownable adventure I wanted to restart once I finished, and I can only hope that there is more like it on the horizon from Kathryn Purdie! I think this book is truly destined to be a best seller for YA fantasy readers, and the perfect Fall cozy read. Again, if you are looking for a book that would be perfect for fans of Stephanie Garber, Holly Black, or Marissa Meyer THIS IS IT!

Now for the audiobook, holy cow I am so grateful I got the audiobook arc folks. The narrator Sara Ovens is absolutely on point, and truly feels like the voice of Clara herself. Her voice lends well to magical adventure and she has great distinctions between characters and varied accents. It was very easy to get swept away by her voice and I know I will relisten to this book again, and again! This is one of those audiobooks that truly matches the story’s beautiful flow and feel, and exceeds all expectations for fantasy narration. I will definitely be recommending this format to others, and will be looking for other titles with this narrator as well. She brings even more magic to a story so packed full of it, that you cannot help but want run straight into The Forest Grimm itself!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this audiobook ARC in exchange for an honest review, this will be one of my top reads of the year!