Title: Blood and Thunder (The Grimm Chronicles #5)
Author: Ken Brosky and Isabella Fontaine
Genre: YA Fantasy, Fairytales
Age Group: MG/YA
Rating: 4 stars
Review copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.
Upon making a surprising discovery in a Corrupted’s lair, Alice finds herself torn between her responsibilities as the hero and her desire to live a normal life. She’s been granted a unique opportunity to leave the entire world of the hero behind. But before she can make her ultimate choice, her nightmares return …
A ship is coming. And aboard that ship is one of the most terrifying Corrupted creatures Alice has faced yet. In order to face her foe, Alice will have to do without the help of her scorned friend, Br’er Rabbit.
At school, a miraculous recovery by the star of the baseball team prompts more questions, all of them bringing Alice back to that fateful encounter at the orphanage of doom. To make matters worse, a school bully has taken his terrorizing too far, a friend is in trouble, and the mysterious ship in Alice’s nightmare holds a terrible secret …
Blood and Thunder is the fifth installment in The Grimm Chronicles by authors Ken Brosky and Isabella Fontaine. I didn’t read the previous parts – although I fully intend to, after reading this one – and I had a bit of a tough time understanding the story because of that. But here’s what I gathered.
Hundreds of years ago, the Grimm brothers unleashed fairytale characters upon the world. For a while, everything went great, until the characters began to get Corrupted. Since they didn’t belong in our world, they slowly turned evil, and by then, the brothers Grimm couldn’t destroy them anymore. It was time for a hero to come and save the day. Every generation, a hero would be chosen to fight against the Corrupted. And this generation, the hero title belongs to Alice, a teenage girl who has more than enough on her mind already.
Sounds awesome so far, right? I mean, with that in mind, I can’t help but wanting to read the book. Isn’t that one of the best plots you’ve ever come across?
In Blood and Thunder, Alice is already full-on fighting the Corrupted, but this time around, she gets the chance to say goodbye to her status of hero and go back to being a regular school girl. Since she dropped off the social ladder from popular to zero, it’s a tough choice to make. There are some very typical high-school dynamics in this book that promptly made me feel like I was back in high school myself. While Alice tumbles down the social ladder, her best friend is busy on her rise to the top, distancing them, and making them question their own friendship.
What I liked the most about Alice is her intelligence. She’s clever enough to find her way out of tough situations by using her brain, and that’s something I greatly admire in a protagonist. No over the top powers, but a good brain and a fiesty, sassy personality. I also loved the appearance of the other fairytale characters. This installment focuses a lot on Moby Dick, which isn’t necessarily my favorite story ever. I only read it once, and was glad when I was done. But here, the events take a new, much more interesting twist, and instead of annoying, I found the references to Moby Dick hilarious and I kept trying to figure them out.
The read was short, but hilarious. I laughed out loud sometimes. The fairytale characters are dark – well, since they’re Corrupted, that makes sense – and I enjoyed this ‘dark’ interpretations, that probably resembles the original fairytales a lot more, and not the fluff versions we’ve been telling children for years. And I like that, I like that they’re dark, but that there is still room for some jokes and hilarity in the book.
This was certainly a thrilling read, and I’m looking forward to diving into the other books in the series once I have a bit more spare time on my hands. Highly recommended to everyone who enjoys fairytale adaptations, interesting heroines, and references to other books.
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