Review: Take a bite out of Scarlette
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 26, 2013
The cover art and plot description (a dark retelling of a well-known fairy tale) completely drew me into "Scarlette."  The author does a good job of creating a sense of physical place, and many of the atmospheric descriptions (especially the scenes in the forest/peril from the wolves) put you right in the action with the characters.  And I really wanted to like the heroine, Scarlette, but sometimes she was just so ditzy.  For an 18-year old in 18th century France, living in some harsh conditions, I expected a little more grit, maybe.Or, maybe the book's shortcoming, was, as another reviewer pointed out, more a case of needing "show, don't tell."  There was a lot of "then I did this and he did that" narrative.  This is especially true of the ending.  The book does a fantastic job of keeping you interested in how it's all going to be resolved, but then most of the resolution is a rushed recap of events.  I will say that I had no idea who/what was behind everything until the very end, so the suspense part of the book worked very well.The other downfall of the book is the editing.  Aside from grammar and typos, it just didn't read as though it were narrated by an 18th century French girl.  The contemporary dialogue was pretty jarring in places ("ok," "epic," "flipped out"), and Scarlette's mindset seemed a little too modern/independent.  As a peasant woman, I would expect that she would have had some life experiences that would cause her to showcase her grit and indpendence a little more subtly, while still being craftily effective. She just seems a little too blase about things that I would assume would be a big deal (telling the baron's coachman where to pick her up and drop her off, for example).The premise and many of the descriptions have a lot going for them if the choppy pacing and uneven characterizations could be smoothed out!