Book Review - Grimm Legacy

Some of you know that I LOVE books! I have them stashed everywhere. Despite my best efforts to quarantine them to our home library and my classroom they seem to escape and breed. The stash under my bed is starting to spill out into the walk way. The one in m purse keeps asking for a play mate. The shelves in my classroom are starting to become a heap instead of nice little rows. Some times we go through and clean out the book stash to donate to the local library. I'm ok with that because I know if I just have to read them again I know where they'll be. I was very tempted to stop by Half Price Books today just because they were open on Easter Sunday.
Something I rarely do is check out a book from the library. I read so many books at one time, that they take me forever to read and then I get antsy about turning them in on time. Solve that by checking them out at school because they don't make me return them until the end of the school year. My other problem is that though I love the look of book marks I have not mastered their use. The best I can do is a sticky note, but my kids like to move them. Yes - I dog ear my pages. Yes - it's a problem. It's a problem because so many people have been trained not to dog ear that they look at me like I've committed a sin wen I do it to my own books. Really people?! It's my book!
So when the school librarian handed me a book from the library to read my heart literally stopped for a few seconds. My mind started racing and sweat dumped out of my body. Hot flashes rolled from the tip of my toes to the top of my head, and I thought  was going to puke right there. How do I graciously get out of this?!?!? She checked the book "Grimm Legacy" by Polly Shulman out to me right there.

Yes it's a topic I like. I could read just about anything related to fairy tales. I LOVE fairy tales! I decided to graciously accept the loan and then drop it in the return slot after the weekend. The book landed on my desk, and sat.
Guilt set in. I had to at least read some of it. I LOVED the story concept so much that I didn't want to put the book down. I LOVED the character development, I LOVED the syntax. I made it through most of the book hopeful for sequals. I was telling everyone what a socking surprise the book was. There's magic, mystery, internal struggle between right and wrong, a little teen romance. It had a enough validity to the fairy tale references that it made the writer sound very knowledgeable about fairy tales. It was as if she explored the "what if's?" of fairy tales being true and still existing.
Then I got to the last couple of chapters. They syntax changed. The characters changed. The story line changed. Polly Shulman - unlike a fairy tale you cannot just wave a magic wand and have all the plot lines end. It ruins the story. I felt as if you suddenly decided mid story that you no longer wanted to write it and quit. You might as well have had all the main characters die. There were so many avenues you could have taken and you would have had a great reader following. You had the right mix of everything until the end.
My suggestion to our librarian - check it out to 6th grade girls who are not in the gifted program. Girls who have enough magic left in them to over look the fatal flaws of this book just to see the ending where everything is magically Happily Ever After.