Review: A good story
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 28, 2012
The Other Slipper is an interesting concept with a well thought out plot about the slipper that Cinderella's prince didn't have. We all assumed that Cinderella had it, however, in this story, Jo, a servant at the palace comes across the slipper on the side of the road when she is walking home from the palace.When Cinderella's carriage turned back into a pumpkin, she heard Jo approaching and ran away, leaving the slipper behind. Jo takes the pumpkin home to eat. And the slipper? She doesn't know why she takes it since it isn't really any business of hers, butt she does take it.Of course, the slipper is magical and when it starts to hum in a very annoying way, Jo decides that it wants to get back with its pair. The prince has found Cinderella and asked her to marry him, so Jo visits the soon-to-be princess. The slippers want more than just to be back together however, they want to be returned to the person Ella's godmother borrowed them from in order to do the spell that turned Ella into someone fit for the ball. This is where the story gets really interesting.From the blurbJo sets out on a journey that thrusts her into an unexpected world of magic and illusions. It soon becomes clear that there is a lot more to her mission as she discovers startling secrets about her past and struggles to embrace her destiny.It's a good story with some interesting twists. The characters are well rounded and, apart from Jo's rather impulsive, paranoiac and sometimes stupid behaviour, likeable. I like the way we come to see the reasons behind the `evil' person's behaviour and discover another side to him, so that he isn't just someone that we can dismiss as simply evil. Instead, the author allows us to feel some compassion for him.I also liked how the revelation of Jo's family history wove into the action and the characters development was well done, especially that of Ron.Although, the text was clean in terms of punctuation, grammar and spelling, the writing fell short in that we had point of view confusion, known as head-hopping.  Many readers may not notice the problem, but if you feel that the writing is a little `fuzzy', or that you're getting a little confused as to who the main person is in a scene, or that a scene is slowing down and getting overloaded with information, or that the book simply isn't holding you as the story suggests it should, then this is probably why.Head-hopping is when the story is written from one person's point of view, sharing their thoughts and impressions with us, then suddenly we're in another character's head hearing their thoughts for a sentence or two, then we're back in the main characters head or worse in yet another character's head. It is confusing and even if you don't actually notice the specific problem, the overall effect of it is that the reader loses their identification with the main character in a scene. This weakens our engagement with the story since we really don't need to know what everyone is thinking, so it's usually completely unnecessary. Their motivations should be clear from their actions. We end up being told the story from inside many people's heads rather than being shown it in the action as one person sees it.It doesn't make this book bad, but it does show that the author needs to study the craft of writing a little more before writing her next book. I give it three stars, but without the head-hopping it would be 4.