How are you?
Welcome to the first post in my Spooky Week series, every day this week I will be posting a spooky themed post (Friday's post isn't that Spooky but has some elements that fit with the theme). Today I am reviewing Vassa in the Night by Sarah Porter and I received this book in the September Fairyloot Box (the theme was Magic and Mayhem). Like all my other reviews it will follow the usual format!
Vassa in the Night by Sarah Porter- Contains Spoilers
Non-Spoiler Thoughts
I had never heard of this book before receiving it and it made me more interested to read it. I have never read a fairy-tale retelling before and was really excited when I received this. It is a retelling of Vassilisa the Beautiful, which is a Russian fairy-tale. I really enjoyed this book, I gave it 4/5 stars. There were moments that I found I wasn't too interested in and others were I was hooked. The imagery in this book was beyond beautiful. Also each chapter, had a small image as part of the heading and this was something I really liked.
Cover Review
Plot Overview
What Goodreads says:
In the enchanted kingdom of Brooklyn, the fashionable people put on cute shoes, go to parties in warehouses, drink on rooftops at sunset, and tell themselves they’ve arrived. A whole lot of Brooklyn is like that now—but not Vassa’s working-class neighborhood.The average rating for Vassa in the Night on Goodreads is 3.57/5 and this statistic comes from 510 reviews.
In Vassa’s neighborhood, where she lives with her stepmother and bickering stepsisters, one might stumble onto magic, but stumbling out again could become an issue. Babs Yagg, the owner of the local convenience store, has a policy of beheading shoplifters—and sometimes innocent shoppers as well. So when Vassa’s stepsister sends her out for light bulbs in the middle of night, she knows it could easily become a suicide mission.
But Vassa has a bit of luck hidden in her pocket, a gift from her dead mother. Erg is a tough-talking wooden doll with sticky fingers, a bottomless stomach, and a ferocious cunning. With Erg’s help, Vassa just might be able to break the witch’s curse and free her Brooklyn neighborhood. But Babs won’t be playing fair…
I won't be doing a plot overview for this book because to be honest, I find these sections hard to write and feel as though people don't read them. So I am going to be experimenting with changing up the style of my reviews. Let me know what you think.
Character Chat
I am only going to talk about one character and that is Vassa. I really liked Vassa and found myself relating to her lots throughout the book. Personally, I thought that Vassa was an outsider and that she didn't fit in to the situations she was put in. I think that this is something most people can relate to as there have been moments in most peoples lives when we feel like we don't fit in. I loved her relationship with Erg, as you could see that they were close but that there were moments when they annoyed each other. I found the family relationship in this book really interesting as they must all struggle to get on due to the fact they're all related in a really unusual way.Opinion
As I said at the start of my review, I really liked Vassa in the Night. I doubt I would have picked it up if I hadn't been sent it from Fairyloot. I loved the idea of turning a known fairy-tale into a fantasy book. The book was very well written and the imagery in the book was to die for. I really liked the idea of a store being owned by an axe-happy owner, in a fictional sense. I hope we get more things like this in the future as I would be really interested to read it. I thought the use of flashbacks in this book was very clever and that they worked really well within the narrative. I wish now I had made more detailed notes while reading as I don't have much to say on why I like other than, I really like it.So that concludes my rather short review of Vassa in the Night by Sarah Porter, I hope you liked it and if you have read the book, please leave a comment saying what your opinions are. As you can probably tell I'm having some problems writing my reviews at the minute, I'm just finding them hard to write but hopefully that will be over soon.
Love,
Carenza x
