The Color Keepers by Catriona Crehan

Title: The Color Keepers
Author: Catriona Crehan
Length: 1786 Kindle units
Rating: 2 stars
 
The Plot
 
When Emily’s mother buys her a mirror, she has no idea that it’s a magic mirror. That is until it spits out messages for her and turns into a tunnel into a magical world. But when she gets there, Emily accidentally frees the evil Crow Queen, and now it’s up to her and her two champions to gather the four colored keys to save the kingdom.
 
The Good
 
The Color Keepers had a good basic story. Emily brings her brother and her friend Sam on a quest into a magical world where she has to face various challenges in order gather the four colored keys. At the beginning of the story, Emily is isolated and hostile to the world around her, and the tests she faces help her to be more accepting of the people and problems in her life. There is definitely a message of salvation and understanding rather than destruction.
 
The Bad
 
The Color Keepers was very short, and much of the time it felt more like the summary for a book than the book itself. Nothing that happened to the book was developed at all, and it more felt like a simple series of acts that Emily undertook rather than a fleshed out novel. Consequently, it was really hard to get involved in the story on a meaningful level.
 
In spite of this, I found a lot of what happened in the story to be confusing and/or ridiculous. I didn’t really understand the backstory about how the Crow Queen became evil and what that had to do with her sister and how all this somehow related to the colored keys that Emily had to collect. All of it was related to Emily by a talking mouse, who seemed less upset that Emily unleashed the horrible queen onto his world than one would expect. He was more like, “Great, Emily! Now that you’ve done this stupid and horrible thing, you get to go on a quest!”  And then Emily needs to convince the only two people she knows to go into the magic world with her, so she has a “party” where she invites only the two of them and then “tricks” them into coming into her bedroom at the time appointed to travel through the mirror. All in all, the story was so lame that I had to repeatedly stop reading to bury my head in my hands.
 
The Romance
 
Emily starts the book at a new school where she quickly meets an attractive boy named Sam. When Sam asks Emily to sit with him at lunch, she assumes that he means just them alone and refuses to go sit with his friends. Nonetheless, he decides that he likes her and starts hanging out with her alone. Of course, their friendship seems to be nothing more than that, as Sam frequently talks about girls he is thinking of asking out. But now Emily needs Sam’s help to save the magical world from the Crow Queen, and this will almost certainly force them to reveal their true feelings about one another.
 
Will I read more?
 
The Color Keepers is not the worst book I have read for my blog so far, but it is also far from the best.  The story was interesting, but it was not particularly well developed and ended up being overly simplistic. Consequently, I don’t think I will be tuning in for more books in the series, if there are any.
 
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