Published on Goodreads 11/92024
Rating: 🙂/3
Review: Friendships - what being a good friend means and how to be one. Loved the representation. Loved the family braid scene. Could have been shorter. Genre mash up of fantasy, mystery, emotional middle grade.
Format: 👩🏻‍💻
Source: #netgalley

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an ARC. All opinions are my own.

I thought that this story was pleasant. I picked it up as a palate cleanser from the adult fantasy I've been reading and this book definitely gave me that. The story follows Max, a young girl who is the last fairy godmother. She ends up going to the human realm to figure out the wish of a girl who seems to have everything. While this is what the description says, I think the story is actually a bit more than that.

I liked elements of this story. The idea of having multiple realms is not new but I did like how it was done here. The realms influence each other and it explored this idea of how saving one realm could be detrimental for another one that I found fascinating. Max was also an endearing little girl. She, of course, acts like a child, but I liked following her. The other characters I had mixed thoughts about in terms of their dynamics with Max. Max and her grandfather's relationship in particular made me angry and sad at the same time. I wish we could have spent more time developing those relationships. Most of them just fell flat for me, which leads me to the main thing I didn't like.

The story felt very disjointed. The story is so short but I feel like the author was trying to do a little too much. There's a big bad villain, there's the problems with the friendship, a complicated relationship with her grandfather, a mystery involving the parents, the plot of saving the realm, and more. This is all included in a story under 200 pages so none of it really felt developed. All of it did connect in the end, but it just read very random and not as smooth as I would have expected.

Overall, I thought it was a decent story.

This is a magical story with endearing and lovable characters and lots of twists and turns. I really enjoyed this overall!