My Fairytale Life: A Review

My Fairytale Life

How I got this book: Received from the author in exchange for an honest review
Read from: April 13th-14th
My rating: 2 stars

My Fairytale Life opens with tragedy and focuses on the life of 17 year old Jadyn and her father, who have become vampire hunters. After a tiring ten years on the hunt, they move to Miami to escape that life. Little do they know, they're not going to get away that easily.

I have to be honest, I was somewhat disappointed by this book. It's a combination of a lot of things, but I think that I'm partly to blame for my disappointment as well. Seeing as I just finished The Forever Girl, which also had vampires and paranormal elements in it, I think I may have had my hopes up a little too high.

While I am going to be honest in my review I'd rather start off with some positives instead of being a Debbie Downer right out of the gate.

One plus is that this is a very quick read. If you're looking for something to tide you over on a car trip, this would work.

Also, if you enjoy love triangles, then this book is for you.

That being said, there are a lot of things that don't work for me.

The dialogue is stuffy in places. It's  stiff, and too formal for teenagers. Honestly it felt like a journal entry all the way through.  Also, for someone who is supposed to be very close with their dad, Jadyn and her dad definitely don't speak like they are.

One particular issue that really detracted from my reading of the story were formatting errors in my copy. I reviewed this on the Kindle app for PC and in my copy every time there was a word with a double l, like pulled, it would eliminate the second l and make the last letters a separate word so pulled became pul ed. I can certainly fill in the missing gaps but it just got really old. Also, the formatting with the title and the authors name was all skewed as well so I would be reading a line in the dialogue  and suddenly right in the middle of a line there would be: "story story story My Fairytale Life Heather M. White 91 story story story."
So that got to be distracting.

There are also some issues with homonym mixups and tense changes right in the middle of sentences.

By far the biggest parts of the story that didn't work for me was the love triangle, and also the pace.

**SPOILER ALERT***

Jadyn moves into this new town and immediately is drawn to Beau who (it's not hard to figure out) is a vampire. She's also attracted to another guy Jeremy, who warns her to stay away from Beau. Jeremy, we later find out, is a werewolf.

As I was reading the leadup to Jeremy's revelation of being a werewolf I was saying out loud, "Oh no, don't say he's a werewolf" and then when it's revealed that he is, I groaned and read on. The only difference here (at least for me because I haven't finished the Twilight Series yet so I don't know if this is accurate or not) is that Jadyn likes Jeremy (werewolf) more than Beau (vamp)  in this case.

***END SPOILER***

The pace of the story is also questionable. This all happens in three weeks which just doesn't seem plausible. Even making it a couple of months would have made it work better.

The end of this story is predictable but it does leave a nice setup for the next book.

I know that my review was mostly negative, and I'm not happy about that. But, I figure it's better to be honest than try and be nice and sugarcoat things.  I'm not saying that this book is bad, it's not. I think that with some more editing and polishing it has  potential. It just doesn't work for me as it is  right now.

And just because this book didn't work for me doesn't mean that it won't work for one of you.