Ella Enchanted
by Gail Carson Levine
Date Read: 2/7/17
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Wow, it's been a while since I've posted a review! It took me a LONG time to get through The School of Good and Evil #3. In the meantime, I've listened and completed Ella Enchanted too. Here is the review for the latter.
I actually really enjoyed this book. It took a while to get
used to the narrator – she sounds like a 12 year old girl! But once I got used to it, it worked and I
was able to get in to the story.
I’ve seen the movie several times and enjoyed it. But the
book is really different than the movie. The main character names and the
obedience curse are about all that they kept for the movie. I really liked that
Ella and Char knew each other for a long time and were good friends. You could
really see how their feelings grew for each other. No insta-love here.
The one thing that I didn’t think the book captured was just how horrible being obedient could be – in the movie, someone tried to use her to harm another person. That never happens in the book – she just considers it when she’s contemplating making a move on her feelings for Char. I think the book should have capitalized on that more. And it made more sense in the movie how she was able to break the curse herself. In the book, she broke it on the THOUGHT of someone using her in that way, so it just didn’t feel as strong enough a reason to break the curse.
The other languages were odd as well. I couldn’t keep
straight which was which. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as strange if I was
reading the physical book, but listening to it just kind of jarred me out of
the story.
