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Blog Tour Review - The Fall Is All There Is by C.M. Caplan

 Blog Tour Review - The Fall Is All There Is by C.M. Caplan All Petre Mercy wanted was a good old-fashioned dramatic exit from his life as a prince. But it's been five years since he fled home on a cyborg horse. Now the King—his Dad—is dead—and Petre has to decide which heir to pledge his thyroid-powered sword to. As the youngest in a set of quadruplets, he’s all too aware that the line of succession is murky. His siblings are on the precipice of power grabs, and each of them want him to pick their side. If Petre has any hope of preventing civil war, he'll have to avoid one sibling who wants to take him hostage, win back another’s trust after years of rivalry and resentment, and get an audience with a sister he's been avoiding for five years. Before he knows it, he's plunged himself into a web of intrigue and a world of strange, unnatural inventions just to get to her doorstep. Family reunions can be a special form of torture. The Fall Is All There Is is one of the book...
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Review - The Vanishing Trick

The Vanishing Trick by Jenni Spangler








 Madame Augustina Pinchbeck, travels the country conjuring the spirits of dearly departed loved ones... for a price. Whilst her ability to contact ghosts is a game of smoke and mirrors, there is real magic behind her tricks too - if you know where to look.
 
Through a magical trade, she persuades children to part with precious objects, promising to use her powers to help them. But Pinchbeck is a deceiver, instead turning their items into enchanted Cabinets that bind the children to her and into which she can vanish and summon them at will.
 
When Pinchbeck captures orphan Leander, events are set into motion that see him and his new friends Charlotte and Felix, in a race against time to break Pinchbeck’s spell, before one of them vanishes forever…




This is one of the darkest, creepiest middle grade books I've read!

Madame Pinchbeck is a truly horrifying villain, and I loved her mixture of showmanship, manipulation and control. It was done so cleverly that it would be quite believable (and almost as horrible) even without the magic. One element I particularly liked was her relationship with Felix, one of the trapped children who had been with her the longest. The expression of Stockholm Syndrome was really believable and powerful and made his character particularly interesting in its complexity. Similarly, the relationship between Leander and Charlotte was complex and fascinating, with their different upbringings reflected in their attitudes to stealing, for one thing.

The fairytale elements were woven in really skillfully, with the background slowly being revealed in a way that kept me enthralled, as the novel built up to a dramatic and exciting climax.

I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anybody interested in dark fairytale stories.

Exciting, scary, fantastic.


I'm giving The Vanishing Trick five moons

🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
The Vanishing Trick by Jenni Spangler is published today, 30th April 2020, by Simon and Schuster. I was given an eProof in return for an honest review on Netgalley.



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