Evie is happiest when she s healing people, diagnosing diseases, and prescribing medications. So when her best friend, Wormy, unexpectedly proposes to her, she kindly turns him down; she has far too much to do to be marrying anyone. And besides, she simply isn’t in love with him.
But a certain meddling fairy named Lucinda has been listening in, and she doesn’t approve of Evie’s rejection. Suddenly, Evie finds herself transformed from a girl into a hideous, hungry ogre!
Evie now has only sixty-two days to accept another proposal – or else be stuck as an ogre forever.
[Slight spoiler/question thing at the bottom of post]
One of my all time favourite books is Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, so I was excited to hear it was getting a companion novel. Ogre Enchanted takes place years before Ella’s story, but throws in a few familiar names (which I didn’t realise with some of them until nearing the end of the book). It’s also another adaptation of a fairy tale, which is something I never realised, and I’m not sure many other readers would have done either. I’d never heard of The False Prince and the True, which is why later plot points felt a bit shoehorned in, because it was all part of following the plot of the original fairy tale. Although she does a good job of tying it in to Ella’s origins, and t certainly picks up the pace in the second half of the book. I just think with Ella Enchanted, people know the story, so they know what key elements to look out for, and how it’s been changed. If you’re like me and unfamiliar with The False Prince and the True, you don’t have that comparison to draw from.
I’m not sure how much of Evie’s personality is who she genuinely is, and what’s the result of being turned into an ogre because we don’t get to see much of her before she’s transformed which literally happens by the end of the first chapter (at which point she’s already reminding me of Data from Star Trek lol which is who I compared her to for the rest of the book, but just a hungry one). As for her passion for being a healer, it did seem to be her sole interest throughout the book (besides the sudden need to find someone to marry) and I wish there’d been a little more to her. Some other interest, or something to show a shared hobby between her and Wormy besides her testing medication on him?
We follow her on her quest to find love and break the spell, which is a simple enough plot (I mean it is a kid’s book) and straight away I rule out Wormy (on account of the name, I mean come on) and the fact his proposal was a total of seven pages in. Besides, everyone knows the protagonist doesn’t end up with the first guy she’s with. She also calls him ‘dear’ like she’s his grandmother or something. Weird. She ventures out on her own to find other ogres in order to learn how to zEEn, when she comes across Peter, a handsome merchant who offers her his donkey for dinner while he makes a run for it.
WHEN THE BOOKENDS 