The Enchantress Returns | Book review

Title: The Enchantress Returns (The Land of Stories #2)

Author: Chris Colfer

Published: August 6th 2013 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Goodreads summary: After decades of hiding, the evil Enchantress who cursed Sleeping Beauty is back with a vengeance.

Alex and Conner Bailey have not been back to the magical Land of Stories since their adventures in The Wishing Spell ended. But one night, they learn the famed Enchantress has kidnapped their mother! Against the will of their grandmother, the twins must find their own way into the Land of Stories to rescue their mother and save the fairy tale world from the greatest threat it's ever faced.

REVIEW

I really enjoyed the first book in this series, The Wishing Spell, when I read it last year, but unfortunately, this book wasn't as good as the first one. I had issue with the pacing and there was too many characters at some point.

We go back into the Bailey twins life a year after the Wishing Spell. They're now thirteen, obsessed with the fact they're young adults (teenagers, yes, young adults NO), they haven't been able to go back to the Land of Stories and haven't heard of their grandmother. They have to live the drama of every teenager, like their mom having a boyfriend who wants to marry her. But everything changes when their mom is taken and that their grandmother is back, afraid for their sakes because the Enchantress has returns (dum dum dum). 

I really liked that the prologue was set in the Eastern kingdom (aka Sleeping kingdom) and that Sleeping Beauty was on the run, it put me right back into the story, it was fast-paced and everything. Alas, it wasn't like that for the rest of the novel. For the first third of the novel, the children are confined in their home and then tries to go back to the Land of Stories. Excuse me, but it was too long. Chris Colfer wrote a 517 pages book and it took a third of the story for the characters to go back into the world we're interested in. Did I mention it's supposed to be middle-grade? If I was one, I would have dnfed. 

I really enjoyed to be in this world again, because of course, fairy tales! But there were so many characters. I couldn't even remember who Froggy was and he's really important! I understand that secondary characters are needed and I loved some like Goldilocks, but when there are too many... You get lost! Some of them weren't all that necessary, like Mother Goose, who appeared at the beginning of the novel and then in the last chapters. I really enjoyed her characters, but I'm questionning her usefulness here.

It was a big book but there wasn't that much content, I feel like most of the time, it was just traveling. At some point in the story, the characters have a quest, but sadly, it was one item per chapter, so it was done really fast. Moreover, defeating the Enchantress was a little bit easy, because it's one of those cases where the character had it in him since the beginning. Nevertheless, the ending left me teary-eyed, but I'm not really sure I'm motivated to keep with this series. It doesn't really end on a cliff-hanger, I don't think I'm missing to much by passing this one out.

Have you read this series? Do you think I should keep up with it?