This is one of those series that’s everything I don’t normally read: it’s YA with a teenage girl as the main character, there’s a shedload of school drama and boyfriend angst, it’s written in first person, and, would you believe it, the protagonist turns out to have unusually strong magical powers. As a rule, I’d be running a mile. But this is by Marina Finlayson, the author who seduced me into enjoying werewolves and other shifters, so it not only works, it works brilliantly. In The Fairytale Curse, Vi and twin sister CJ found themselves spitting frogs and diamonds respectively, while others around them were turned into the sleeping beauty, an ogre and a polar bear. It turned out the Sidhe were escaping from their magical captivity, but Vi and friends managed to lock them up again, at the price of losing one of the four artifacts that kept them […]

I’ve loved everything the author has written to date, so this was right at the top of my reading list. It’s not my usual fare (YA? High school? Proms? Really not my thing) but Finlayson achieved the seemingly impossible and taught me to love werewolves, so I was pretty confident she could work the same magic again. Here’s the premise: 17-year-old twin sisters CJ (the pretty one) and Violet (the other one) wake up after a party to find they’ve been cursed. Whenever they speak, they spit diamonds (CJ) or frogs (Violet) from their mouths. And they’re not the only ones to find themselves on the wrong end of a fairytale curse. But strangely, Mum and Dad aren’t quite as surprised as might be expected. Turns out they’re part of a whole organisation devoted to keeping the unpleasant fairies (Sidhe) harmlessly locked away. And wouldn’t you just know it, those […]