Grimm Memories

Grimm Memories picks up about 6 months after Andi, Quinn, Dylan, and Fredrick escape and get back home from Elorium. The four friends have been back with their families, but continue to talk to each other daily. They managed to talk their families into letting them all go to Andi's house over spring break. Even with over protective parents, the group manages to find a way back to Elorium. This time, on purpose, to try to rescue Jack and bring him home. When they get there, Elorium is not how they left it. Jack and many of the others have disappeared. The citizens are panicking and there are so many rumors, no one knows what is really going on. Despite everything, they are determined to rescue Jack! This book was SO much better than the first one! Grimm Memories is action packed and full of surprises! I could not put this book down, I just had to know what was happening next! There was not a dull moment in this book. It was much more fast paced than Grimm Legacy. I'm not sure why, but I wasn't expecting this to be so good, so maybe that plays into my feelings of it. Regardless, this book was awesome! So many fantasy aspects, that all went so well together! The ending left off at a good spot for another book, which I am really hoping for!

"The nightmares were getting worse, plaguing her more and more over the last six months. Images, sharp and vivid as a recent memory, invaded her dreams until the lines of reality melted together."

Grimm Memories by Janna Jennings Published Oct 29, 2014 by Patchwork Press Young Adult Fantasy Format: e-book; 337 pages Also By This Author: A Grimm Legacy Rating: 4/5

(spoilers below for A Grimm Legacy)

Synopsis:

It has been six months since Quinn and her friends returned home after barely escaping Elorium—but no one ever really leaves the world where fairy tales are born. Not a day has gone by where they haven’t thought about returning to save Jack. Even their dreams are urging them to return to the strange world.

Falling back into the fairy tale world, they find the situation more dire than the way they left it. Jack has disappeared, and he’s not the only one. Elorium’s citizens are near panic as characters are missing and rumors are spreading about massive creatures roaming the sky. A rising darkness is enslaving the dreamers, and in a land filled with water nymphs and malevolent mazes, it’s hard to find any allies.
Despite the risks of their rescue mission, Fredrick is determined to bring back his grandfather, no matter how personal the cost.

Thoughts:

“Far off places, daring sword fights, magic spells, a prince in disguise!”

If you’re a fan of Beauty and the Beast you’ll recognize that line from the opening song. It’s the line that kept playing in my head while reading The Grimm Tales series by Janna Jennings.

Grimm Memories, the sequel to A Grimm Legacy, picks up six months after Andi and her friends escape Elorium. The group devises a plan to return to the fairy-tale world after Andi and Dylan begin having strange nightmares. Frederick is determined to rescue his grandfather, Jack, who they were forced to leave behind during their escape. But when the teenagers return to Elorium, they find things a lot stranger than they had left them.

Our four heroes and heroines have changed a bit since we last saw them, although their distinct personalities remain intact. Frederick, Andi, and Quinn are still stubborn in their own ways, but they return to Elorium prepared to fight, both physically and mentally. Dylan, in an appropriate fashion, didn’t even bother to brush up on his knowledge of fairy-tales before deciding to come back to Elorium, something that Quinn hilariously calls him out on more than once.

While our group of fairy-tale descendants are back and better than ever, the world of Elorium has changed for the worse. Houses have been destroyed and left destitute and many Elorians have mysteriously disappeared. Grimm Memories is a lot darker than A Grimm Legacy. The nightmares that Dylan and Andi suffer through every night are haunting, and the new creatures and story book characters the group encounters during their second visit to Elorium are more dangerous and unfriendly than before. This added so much suspense which I thoroughly enjoyed. There are several scenes in this novel where Andi and her friends’ lives are in peril and often people were gravely injured. Suffice it to say that the suspense was killing me during several of the more intense chapters!

The novel’s resolution is sweet and well-done. Some of my lingering questions were answered (always a plus), and while I don’t think there are plans for a third book, there is an epilogue at the end that leaves us with a bit of a cliffhanger, so who knows? :)

Also…once again, I adored this book cover! So pretty!

Read This Book If…:

…you’ve already finished A Grimm Legacy (this is not a stand-alone novel)
…you’re intrigued by darker fairy-tale characters
…you’re in the mood for a good suspense novel
…you like happy endings :)

Final Musings

As much as I enjoyed the first Grimm Tales book, I liked the second one ever more! There was more action, more mystery & suspense, and more adventures with the characters I’ve come to love. Grimm Memories deals with sacrifice, love, and friendship, and it is full of surprises in every chapter! If you like reading stories that can make you laugh, swoon, and bite your nails, this book is for you!

I want to say thank you to Patchwork Press and Netgalley for letting me read this book. Wow is the only thing I can say about this book. It was really good. I felt like everything came together in this book. Things made more sense and didn't really confuse me as much as the last book did. I really loved this book. This book left me wanting more. I wasn't so sure if I wanted to continue this series at the end of the last book but I loved it. The idea of this story is different from most fairy tales in so many ways. I love how this story I can't say there is other stories with this plot. I loved it. I hope there is more coming from this series.

Andi, Quinn, Dylan and Frederick are back in the real world after their adventures in Elorium. They starting having nightmares and decide it is time to go back and try to rescue Jack. Quinn’s brother Max gets sucked along for the ride. Elorium is not how they left it though. People are disappearing and others are having nightmares as well. This just makes the gang that much more determined to find Jack and figure out what is going on. There is a lot of adventure and excitement, a couple of people almost die, and there are a few other fairytales added to the mix.
I liked this second book in the Grimm Tales series. The story seemed a bit more cohesive than the first as we didn’t have to introduce characters and their stories all over again. There is plenty of action and intrigue as the group travels across Elorium to find Jack. I enjoyed the developing relationships between the boys and girls and the fact that the girls were awesome. Andi and Quinn pretty much ruled the adventure. They showed that girls can be smart, prepared and kick-butt as well.

Andi, Quinn, Fredrick, and Dylan return to Elorium in this second installment in Jennings’s Grimm Tales series, but this time, voluntarily. Their goal is to rescue Jack, Fredrick’s grandfather, but the world they fall into isn’t exactly the same as the one they left behind. Some characters have died, some have gone missing, and the deeper the characters delve into Elorium, the more they realize that something’s gone wrong. Not that two of them couldn’t tell that something was up — Andi and Dylan began to experience terrifyingly unsettling nightmares that evoke feelings that often linger past the moment they awake. Are those nightmares linked to the strange events in Elorium?

So this book has a lot of answers that I didn’t even know I wanted to have after the first book. You find out a lot about the past of secondary characters, and I really liked how Jennings brought these minor characters back so we get to see what became of them. There were many new characters, however, and they were all delights. Once again, the author’s use of tropes from the Grimm Fairy Tales was done beautifully — although I did miss Cinderella — and makes me really regret not picking up a copy of the original tales to get acquainted with them.

I found that the balance between the characters was perfect, and a vast improvement from the first book. Everyone got their moments to shine, and I could finally gain insight in their own personalities. Great character development, especially on Fredrick’s part. I also liked the involvement of Quinn’s brother (Max), despite early doubts.

Why four stars if it’s so good? In my review of the first book, I complained that the novel felt disjointed, and I still have that feeling. There were some sentences and entire paragraphs that could’ve been improved to flow better. At this point, I wonder if it might just be the author’s style that clashes with personal preference, but I hate having to back up in a book because I fear I missed something.

Overall, it was a great improvement from the first book. The character development, plot, lovely balance of genres (there’s romance and it’s well done!! No love triangles! Slow build up! Finally someone who does it well! Not to spoil anything, but there’s a kiss in there, and I squealed!), were all improved in this second volume.

To be honest, I hadn’t expected to read past the second book (since I had received both at the same time), but I found myself searching whether or not there was a third book. I was delighted to find that we’ll be gifted with a third and a fourth tome of this series. I want to keep reading about those characters, and hopefully by then I will have better knowledge of the Grimm Fairy Tales.

Go read it, guys. You’ll like it.

I’d like to thank Netgalley, as well as Patchwork Press, for the free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Grimm Memories was a great sequel to A Grimm Legacy.It takes up about a half a year after the last book left off. Andi and Dylan have been having strange and disturbing dreams that lead them to sneak back into Elorium to try and find answers. They are joined by their other friends along with Quinn's brother. We are treated to more excitement and adventure as the group struggles to find out why Elorium is in turmoil.

I loved the fact that in this book we got to see relationships between the characters grow and change. I also enjoyed seeing many of the characters from the last book return.

The story and ending were well done. This book had a little bit darker take on some of the tales, but it did it well and I enjoyed reading through it all. I'd love to see another book in this series, but the author wrapped this one up well enough that I'd be happy just to have this one and the first one.