Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Revenge of the Castle Cats by Isabella Fontaine & Ken Brosky

Title: Revenge of the Castle Cats
Series: The Grimm Chronicles
Author: Isabella Fontaine & Ken Brosky
Previous Books in Series: Prince Charming Must Die!, Happily Never After
Rating: 4 stars
Length: 3496 Kindle units (includes fairy tales)

Refresher: Alice must use a magic pen to kill corrupted creatures from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to prevent them from wreaking havoc on unsuspecting humans. Accompanying her in this task is the newly tech-savvy Bre’r Rabbit, who prefers to be known as Briar.

Revenge of the Castle Cats is the third installment of The Grimm Chronicles, and I feel like the series is really hitting its stride. The plot continues from the second book, where we learned that three of the seven dwarves are involved in an evil plot to make everyone play a smartphone game called Castle Cats. Clearly they must be stopped, especially when it turns out in this book that they are using their code to compel people to buy gross candy bars.

The biggest problem I had with the first two books was that the big reveal at the end of the book was so patently obvious that I didn’t even feel like it should have been kept a secret. That problem was totally absent from this installment. The ending was both surprising and appropriately climactic. Alice also got to bring her friend Seth in on some of the adventure, which was fun because more characters who know what’s going on means more social interaction. And social interaction is much of what makes stories interesting.

Of course, it would not be a review from me if I did not point out the biggest problem I had with the book. In this case, it was that I don’t feel like the authors really knew enough about programming to be writing a book that featured it so prominently. Seth as a character is apparently learning about computer programming by borrowing books from the library. He talks about code without mentioning any programming languages, as if it is all the same. 
Nonetheless, he manages to get to the source code of Castle Cats, which seems unlikely as it is certainly not open source. So he clearly has some mad hacking skills. That he’s somehow managed to learn from the books he borrowed from the library. Yeah, I’m not buying that.

Overall, though, it was a cute story and an exciting installment, and I’m looking forward to reading the next one.

See Details for Book on    Amazon 

1 comment:

  1. Ugh so true about the programming thing. But it was the only way for us to get from point A to point B in this case without making the story insanely complicated. Definitely something we're NOT going to do again, though. Thanks for the review!

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