Sitting down to write this as a blog post early this morning, I realized what my issue is, and why I come out being so "nice" when I'm complaining about a book. In order to really get down and dirty about it, I have to give away spoilers, and I hate giving away spoilers, but I can always just warn that there are spoilers.
There are spoilers. There's your warning. Even if I'm not necessarily telling you the name of the book or the author.
I'm reading another Disney villain series, a YA, one that was picked up by Disney and turned into a television series (and apparently two TV movies), which I just found out about when I was making a list of Disney movies for my mom.
I really enjoyed the first book, even if I thought the ending was a little TOO easy and had a few other issues with it. It's a YA, and I'm not making excuses for YA, but some of them seem to be directed towards younger ages, and parts of this book seemed to be that way. Not the whole thing, though, which was strange. And to be honest, I happen to like YAs and have read lots of them that work for both kids and adults, so I really should be ticked that this YA seemed to dumb itself down for the kids, but that's a whole other story.
I took a break to read another book, finished that, and started the second book of the series last night.
I'm only a few chapters in, so I'm not necessarily frustrated with the book, but I AM frustrated with the story that was lost.
Ya see, they start out on an island, these villains (well, children of villains) with their parents and come across some "magic," something that had been outlawed twenty or so years earlier when the villains were exiled to this island. The end, like I said, is rather easy, but there is still no magic.
All of a sudden, though, between book one and book two, magic has somehow invaded the world again, because there is this big battle between the head villain, and it's these four kids that save the day (i.e. save the good guys from their bad parents).
Yes, you read that correctly. BETWEEN book one and book two. I only know about this event because there are two pages at the beginning of book two (an introduction of sorts) that explain (TWO WHOLE FLIPPING PAGES ABOUT THIS EPIC BATTLE THAT I WOULD HAVE LOVED TO HAVE READ) why the kids are "good" now and living on the main land with the goods, sans their evil parents.
What the hell?
When I begin a series, I go by the book description of book one in deciding whether this is a series for me. This series makes me feel like I should have read all the descriptions before beginning, but then I would have been dealing with spoilers and the story wouldn't have been so intriguing as I went through. But really? This series began as villain kids on an adventure for a villain parent and they are all being really villainy (well, not really, because they're sort of lame in their villainy, but they are kids, and this is YA, but they are the children of some of the most awesome villains, so you would think that they would be more villainy, but maybe they just didn't seem very villainy considering they are surrounded by other villains). Yeah, they become friends (something villains don't have), but I wanted to continue a series where they are villains, and maybe grow up to be even better villains than their parents, and that maybe evil would finally win and take over (don't get me wrong, I really like the good, too, but I feel like a lot of times the villains are a let down because they lose so easily to things like love and simple mistakes that you would think really horrible villains just would not make). I did not want to learn all about their high school life with the goods, and how the main villain kid is now in a relationship (because they're in looooooooooooove) with the main good kid, who is now king.
Even more so, there are things from the first book that were not explained, but now are just "fact." Like, they were dreaming about each other before they even met. Why? Don't tell me that this is one of those "meant to be" sort of things. The only real anything was when he realized that him and his ex-girlfriend (while they were still together and dancing and she was singing their song, "Once Upon a Dream") were not meant to be because he never dreamed about her, but he did dream about this other girl, and the story almost begins with her dreaming about some random prince.
I am at a part where they are being called back to their island by some mysterious messages, so I have high hopes, but I can't believe this epic battle is just sort of washed under the bridge like that.
I'm fixing to give up on series that involve Disney characters, which will suck because I have a lot of them on my Kindle...
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