Second Hand Curses

Second Hand Curses takes a cynical look at fairy tales without going dark and gritty. Each chapter takes on a different story, semi-episodic, with our trio of main characters carrying an overarching story with them.

The audiobook has different people voice the narrator and characters, and it's actually good! Not sure I've witnessed that before.

I'm not sure what I expected going in to this book but it turned out really entertaining and well written. This is heavy on the action and does rely on knowledge of the more popular European fairy tales and nursery rhymes for the entertainment to come through. It's chock full of action but does manage to pack in some pretty impressive character development for a book that doesn't seem apparently concerned with it. The ending seems to set things up for a sequel so I'm hoping that will happen.

This book takes on the structure of a series of fairy tale and nursery rhyme retellings, but told through the perspective of a band of scoundrels called the Bastard Champions who go around taking up jobs for coin (getting Cinderella out of a disadvantageous bargain with a fairy godmother, for instance). While it may look like a collection of unconnected short stories, these stories actually take place in chronological order as the Bastard Champions plod their way through the land attempting to track down the notorious Blue Fairy. The action of the book is not sanitised either and can be fairly graphic and violent, although the tone is always pretty light-hearted and never too grim.

We follow fearsome trio Jack, Frank, and Marie in their journeys across the land, each of them harbouring their own curses and secrets. I enjoyed how we plunge into the action first and see the scoundrel state they've all landed up in in the present time, but slowly the adventures become a pretext for us finding out more about each of their backstories, peeling their characters back layer by layer.

Just like its main three characters, the book does have a core of fairy-tale optimism and naivete, despite its external facade of cynicism and violence. Instead of your whole “happily ever after”, we get the sense that book truly believes in the strength and power of friendship against all odds.

A short and fun read that I'd recommend to anyone who enjoys fairy tale retellings with a dash of adventure, action, and a charismatic trio that we can get behind at the center of it all.

Executive Summary: I ended up enjoying this a lot more than I expected to. It wasn't as fun as his NPCs series but given that I'm not a big fairy tale fan, I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun he made it.Audiobook: I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the 3 narrator approach, but it seemed to work well. I'm not sure which of the male narrators was the primary, whoever voiced Jack, but they did a good job with the overall narration beyond just reading Jack's parts. Both other of the others did a good job as well. If Mr. Hayes writes a sequel, I hope they hire the same three again. It definitely worked well in audio.Full ReviewI really enjoy Drew Hayes [b:NPCs 22088245 NPCs (Spells, Swords, & Stealth, #1) Drew Hayes https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1400095217s/22088245.jpg 41426688] series, but I haven't read any of his other stuff before. There has been a bit of a trend to write modern fairy tales, or to repurpose traditional fairy tales. I've read a few and I enjoyed the show Grimm, but it's not something I was really itching for reading more of.I mostly picked this book up because it was on sale and a bit on the strength of his other books I've read. The majority of this book is episodic. Each chapter uses a classic fairy tale and puts a (often humorous) twist on it. I recognized most, but not all of the stories, but as I said fairy tales aren't really my thing.I tend to prefer a bigger story than something episodic like this, but it really seemed to work well, and he did still manage to build a pretty compelling glue story connecting them all together.My favorite part was learning the backstories of the three main characters. I had kind of guessed two of them, but one of them took me by surprise. It's possible if I knew fairy tales better, I'd have been less surprised but it's hard to say.Overall this was a pretty fun/light read and I'd definitely pick up another if he wrote it, but if not it ended in a pretty decent place.