By Brittany Johnson
A powerful fairytale adventure, Johnson crafts an equally exciting and beautiful novel. Perfect for readers looking for a reluctant allies to lovers story with flawed characters facing their demons.
Rating:
Summary:
Amala has spent her whole life trying to be the perfect princess: delicate, quiet, obedient. But when she’s murdered on the night of her wedding, her story is cut short before it begins.
Kha’dasia has been told her whole life that she is too rough, too loud, too much. She’s no ordinary princess but a ruthless warrior on a quest to fulfill her late brother’s dying wish. Except she dies before reaching her destination.
When both girls wake up in a cursed forest, the gods offer them a second chance at life—if they can find true love’s kiss. But there’s a catch, the gods warn. While the right kiss will save you, the wrong kiss will kill you.
On their journey, the princesses must overcome challenges that force them to face the truth of their lives…and their deaths. And as Amala and Kha’dasia grow closer, they can’t help but wonder if true love has been standing right in front of them all along.
(Summary from The StoryGraph)
Review:
Deadly Ever After provides beautiful representation often overlooked in young adult literature. In many fantasy books, characters usually straight, girl boss FMC’s. This book changes the narrative with strong black queer girls working through their own struggles. This gives voice to so many young girls who may not see themselves represented in YA books, and helps combat the toxic issues that can come with the copy paste “girl boss” character when it quietly enforces white feminism ideas.
Beyond the representation, the relationships portrayed in Deadly Ever After are truly beautiful. Throughout the book the characters all grow in kind, loving relationships. For a book that is directed towards younger audiences, Amala and Kha’dasia are wonderful role models of what rewarding and meaningful relationships look like.
In addition, the portrayal of a sexual awakening that the characters experience is truly beautiful, especially when considering there are younger audiences that will be able to see and normalize the experience. While I don’t want to say too much to avoid spoiling, I would simply like to note how well thought out and carefully written this aspect of the book is.
The portrayal of race in Deadly Ever After is also near flawless. This book brings light to many topics and race that are rarely discussed, especially not in a young adult book. This book gives voice to one of many experiences of POC, and helps open the conversation to the complexities it entails.
Moving on to some of the aspects of the book that brought down my rating, the pace of the book is sometimes a little slow. While overall the story is a medium paced novel, there were stretches of action and long stretches when nothing much seemed to happen. This made the book a little less gripping, and ultimately took away from my enjoyment a little bit.
Lastly, the writing style of this book veers more into upper middle grade and lower young adult. While this in of itself isn’t a problem, in fact, it’s amazing that this book offers conversation around important topics for younger readers, it’s more in the marketing. This book is marketed as young adult, which is fair because young adult includes 13 year-olds, it simply doesn’t feel as complex as it should to have that young adult rating. While I understand that some of these topics could be harder for a young reader, overall, I think this book would most entertain and be valuable for upper middle grade readers to enjoy instead of primarily young adult readers.
Thanks so much to Scholastic for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for a free review! All opinions are my own.
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