Book Review--Cloaked

     I have to admit, I wasn't looking forward to reading Cloaked by Alex Flinn. She's not my favorite author, and the plot seemed too haphazard to enjoy. But, out of my loyalty to the fairy tale genre, I read it anyways, and I wasn't impressed.
     First of all, the writing is bland. Flinn tries a little too hard to write like a teenage boy. I appreciate her dedication to staying in character, but that doesn't mean you have to sacrifice style. There's no color or flavor to the language. Scenes that should have been gripping or nail-biting floated on drab words and passed by like a mild breeze.
     What got me through those first boring chapters is the likability of the protagonist, Johnny. However, most of the other characters, especially the supporting characters, are two-dimensional. It was a shame to see some personalities that could be interesting as flat and cliched. Personally, I found the French accents (all the th's replaced with z's) irritating. I couldn't take any character with an accent seriously--all i could think of when one of them spoke was of the French peas in VeggeTales. It added an unintended silliness to their character that I just couldn't overcome.
     Just as I suspected, the story flies all over the place. In an effort to include as many fairy tales as possible, Flinn jumps from subplot to subplot, never really focusing on one particular item long enough for the reader to become invested in it. It doesn't help that most of the tales she uses are so obscure that the reader will have no previous emotional attachment to them. Also, I believe some of the fairy tales should have been modified to be more believable (particularly "The Six Swans"), which Flinn is usually better at. Aside from the sporadic fairy tales, the plot was unexciting and predictable. It was anticlimactic where it should have been intense, and overindulgent where Flinn should have let things go. The end dragged on forever.
     Cloaked was definitely my least favorite of Flinn's fairy tale series. I like the idea of bringing several old folk tales together, but she's better at developing just one at a time (Beastly, A Kiss in Time). But, don't get a bad taste for her just because of this review--the book is one flop in a series of good good modern-day fairy tales. I still look forward to what she writes in the future.