Review of Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher

I received a free e-galley in exchange for an honest review

My Rating. 2.5 Stars

CW’s: not many, mentions of family death.

So the book is cute to start for sure. It doesn’t really pull me in right away. It’s not super boring but it isn’t really engaging either. It definitely picked up a bit. The pacing was just more slow and leisurely. It wasn’t really trying to be too fast paced. By 15% it did start to pick up and the plot got going a bit more.

I love Victorian settings, I think they’re romantic. And I think Fisher does a good job of embodying the aesthetic of that era. I will say, if you don’t like Jane Austen or Emily Bronte or Charlotte Bronte novels, then this book might not be for you. It is very reminiscent of those types of novels, and it very much feels like one of them. I think it’s important to note that this book is really heavy on a very classic-esque feel, it reads as a soft fantasy classic would read. I like that, but it’s clearly not something everyone likes.

The romance was cute, for sure, it felt nice. But that’s all it was…cute. It really wasn’t anything super special and it didn’t stand out. I’m a romantic at heart, and I like swooning romances, especially in a book set in the Victorian era, I feel like the romance should’ve been far more, well, romantic. It just didn’t feel quite rounded enough for my taste. And maybe there’s something to be said about subtlety in the development of the relationship, maybe some people would like that. But honestly? I didn’t. I didn’t really care enough. I wasn’t rooting for them especially hard. At least not from the get-go.

I want to care about the characters and care about their relationships. I want to have to tell myself “it’s just a book, they’re not real, you don’t have to feel so sad for them” and I want to feel the angst when it’s done in a good and healthy way. But there just didn’t seem to be much adversity standing in their way or for them to work together to be against. Yes, they had a shared vested interested in the curiosities shop and Lizzie’s father’s legacy living on. And they shared a love for those books. But I just didn’t feel their predicament. They had people close to them who were sick with a mysterious and terrifying illness. The way the illness is described should bring more terror, I should feel that viscerally…and I just didn’t.

I was also pretty unsure of the magic system. Like…what was it? Was it just ghosts? The world felt underdeveloped and a bit too cliché. It just didn’t feel like the book was super in depth or super developed, a lot of it felt just so hard to be passionate about.

The plot seemed to mostly resolve by the halfway mark. And yeah, there was more, but I feel like the big one sentence summary was completely done by that point.

You know what this book felt like? It felt like if my depression was a book. Like, I’m not sad all the time, and I don’t want to end it all, but I also just live in a world that’s pretty flat emotionally. Like I don’t feel a lot without my sunlamp and medication. Unfortunately for this book, there’s no anti-depressant/SSRI to make things better. Like nothing is BAD or SAD but nothing is good or happy either.

At some point I did ship the main couple, but I just felt like I should have shipped them from the start. I felt like the romantic tension wasn’t there throughout the whole book and I just found myself feeling really bored the whole time. I don’t know, I just wanted to feel more and to giggle more and to kick my feet more. I just didn’t get any of that and I’m kind of disappointed because I felt that way for Olivia Atwater’s Regency Faerie Tales books. I felt like the author could’ve put a bit more emotion into this book, and made it not feel so hollow.

The ending also just felt anticlimactic too. Overall, it was just a “meh” kind of book and didn’t really inspire anything. I think the author could have done better.