Weekly Reader: The Fairy Tale Plague (Anne Anderson Book 2) by Cameron Jace; Prequel and Sequel of Fairy Tales Search is Exciting but Uneven
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: It hurts me to say this because Cameron Jace's The Fairy Tale Code was one of my favorite books last year. It also hurts because I just read two other books that were the second volumes in their series, series that I also loved, but their second volumes were as good as or better than the first ones.
The Fairy Tale Plague, the second book in Jace's Anne Anderson series is good. It has some great moments of suspense and is another great hunt for historical truth that leads to bigger consequences for the entire world. However, it's an uneven volume because it combined two separate adventures, making it a prequel and a sequel. The results are two parts that are fine on their own but are needlessly crammed together.
In The Fairy Tale Code, Folklorist Professor Anne Anderson and DCI David Tale uncover a mystery of a dead woman hanging on a cross. The dead body leads the two down the Fairy Tale Road, a series of locations in Germany that were the real life locations of the sources behind fairy tales. They are followed by a creepy character called The Advocate, who would kill to keep his grip on the world, and The Ovitz Sisters, an eccentric family that are connected to the fairy tale world.
David and Anne uncover the truth that these tales were dark brutal histories disguised as folklore that were gathered and collected by a secret group called the Sisterhood (which the Ovitzs are members of), and not the Brothers Grimm. Their discoveries open the truths about many fairy tale characters, such as Snow White and the Evil Queen who were actually Queen Mary Tudor of England and a young woman whom Mary killed after she caught the interest of her husband, Prince Phillip of Spain.
In the Fairy Tale Plague, the resolutions of the previous volume have become big news. Many now see fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm, and the British Royal Family in different lights. David and Anne have become instant celebrities. However, the Advocate has a story of his own to tell. The story leads us to the prequel portion of the novel.
Three years before Anne wandered down the Fairy Tale Road, she was hired by the wealthy Max Bauer to oversee the digital tour of the Brothers Grimm house in the town of Kassell, Germany. On her way to the Grimm House, she receives a call from a mysterious woman who informs her that she will discover a secret at the House. Her assignment coincides with the abduction of a young girl named Mary Miller. The secret has not only to do with Mary's abduction but centuries of crimes caused by the family of Wilhelm Grimm's wife, Gretchen Wild, crimes that still continue and are being covered up by the people in charge.
Mary's abduction, the unsolved cases of the past, and the themes of powerful families controlling everything around them, including history and folklore are echoed in the sequel portion of the book which begins halfway through the novel.
Anne is connected online to the rest of the Sisterhood, then watches in horror as they are murdered around the world one by one. She then has to save the London based Sister before she is assassinated too.
Meanwhile, David and his partner, Harriet are called to investigate the death of the Prince of Wales. No his name's not William. It's Julian. (Though he is the son of the recently crowned king so that makes things interesting). It turns out the deaths of the Prince, the Sisters, and Mary's abduction in the prequel are tied to the existence of a very powerful network of families and a fairy tale that could foretell the end of mankind, a tale called The Last Fairy Tale.
It's not that the prequel and sequel are bad. Individually, they are very good very involved stories that captivate the Reader's interest.
The prequel has some great intense moments where the kidnapper taunts Anne and others through emails revealing that they not only know exactly where Anne is but what she is doing at any given time.
It also becomes eerie as the kidnapper provides Anne with a series of clues and riddles to Mary's whereabouts. As Anne solves them, other clues pop up on the Grimm House virtual tour so she is definitely being monitored by a highly intelligent and ruthless individual.
Even the resolution is brilliant as it reveals another tie to the fairy tale world that Anne is so enamored with and shows that unlike fairy tales, in reality, good does not always win and evil does not always get punished.
The sequel portion is just as nail biting. David has a personal tie to what happened to Prince Julian and as Anne did in Fairy Tale Code, he is able to use own expertise on the life and works of Charles Darwin to provide answers. There also is a fascinating link between Darwin and the Brothers Grimm which may not have existed in reality but gives an intriguing backstory to the series which combines the magic of folklore with the process of scientific theory.
Anne's part in the story involves protecting the remaining Sisterhood with some old friends. That means the Ovitz Sisters, my favorite characters from the first book, are back and are more active in helping Anne and their fellow Sisters. Now that Anne and the Ovitzs have found each other and accepted each other as family, they have no intention of letting their remaining family members go.
Speaking of families, we once again get some hints about Anne and David's troubled backgrounds. In the prequel, Anne succumbs to blackouts when thinking of her missing sister, Rachel. One of her enemies uses that PTSD to their advantage by accusing her of killing her sister and others. While in the Fairy Tale Code, the Reader knows that isn't true, it still puts Anne in a very vulnerable position.
However, in the sequel portion, David gets more attention than Anne and we learn more about his family such as his Darwin obsessed mother and physically deformed sister, Abigail. Many of the things that were hinted at in The Fairy Tale Code about David are outright said here and they show the full picture of who this detective really is. Just like Anne was shaped by her life with Rachel to love and study fairy tales, David was shaped by his life with Abigail to protect others by bringing criminals to justice.
There are a few big reveals and twists in the Fairy Tale Plague that are at first confusing but upon rereading the first volume check, are brilliantly foreshadowed, and work seamlessly into both books. They are surprise twists that are well executed.
There is a lot to recommend in this volume of the series but its pacing is uneven because of the prequel and sequel being part of one book. The prequel doesn't get as much time to develop its story before it's resolved. The sequel ends just as the characters learn some answers as though this adventure is just getting warmed up before its final chapter. It would have been better for Jace to release the prequel in novella form and add extra chapters to the sequel, thereby making them separate volumes rather than one.
Because of this unevenness, The Fairy Tale Plague is nowhere near as good as its predecessor but as an adventurous look into the history of fairy tales, there is still plenty to recommend.
