I like fairytales. I like twisted fairytales. I like retellings of fairytales and fairytales just being the backdrop of the story. So, when I read the description of this book, I got very excited because it was a new version of a fairytale that I hadn’t seen before. Before I go into my actual review, I am going to just copy and paste the description of the book from Goodreads: “Two Hearts. One Hope.
Rose has been appointed as a healer’s apprentice at Hagenheim Castle, a rare opportunity for a woodcutter’s daughter like her. While she often feels uneasy at the sight of blood, Rose is determined to prove herself capable. Failure will mean returning home to marry the aging bachelor her mother has chosen for her—a bloated, disgusting merchant who makes Rose feel ill.
When Lord Hamlin, the future duke, is injured, it is Rose who must tend to him. As she works to heal his wound, she begins to understand emotions she’s never felt before and wonders if he feels the same. But falling in love is forbidden, as Lord Hamlin is betrothed to a mysterious young woman in hiding. As Rose’s life spins toward confusion, she must take the first steps on a journey to discover her own destiny.”
Ok – so I definitely thought this was a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, not necessarily from this description but as you start to read the book you get major vibes of Sleeping Beauty from it. The book started to follow a lot of the major plot points of that fairytale and I was waiting to see what the twist was. Little did I know, I was not going to be pleased with the twist.
Let me state right now, I have NO PROBLEM with religious books, be it books about religion, books that incorporate a lot of religion, or religious texts themselves. What I do have a problem with is books that do not warn me that they are going to be trying to indoctrinate me while I am reading them. Well, this book happened to be in that latter category.
Spolier-y part of the review….except I am not going to really spoil anything too much I don’t think.
The main character, Rose, has 0 spine. She hems and haws all over the place. The relationship between the two characters is paper thin – I wasn’t rooting for them at *all* because I saw no reason to do so. The main evil guy was obviously evil, and I just wasn’t sure what his motivation was other than “evil.” This book is short – like less than 300 pages – so I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of deep meaningful character development, but I was expecting some amount of desire to bond to the characters. The one thing that I was not prepared for, and very unhappy about, was the amount of religiousness that happened in this book.
Oh. My. Goodness. This book is slated as YA Historical Romance, and I understand that in medieval times Christianity was *the* religion of the land, and demons and witches are like big no-nos, but like…..if you are the main character of a book, you have to do something yourself you can’t just go “Oh God will save me!” and have me want to continue reading. I legit got annoyed reading this book because they straight up started doing the whole “The Power of Christ Compels You” demon banishing thing, and the magic in this book was the grace of God and whatnot.
Look – if you want to read or write Christian fiction, I am not going to bash you, in fact I highly encourage it because there is a HUGE market for that! However, I will say this, *DO NOT* hide the fact that is what it is! Besides the poor character development, this book had nothing except religious indoctrination, and that was not what I was looking for in my retelling of a fairytale. Had I known that this was a Christian series I might not have read the book, or I might have read it with that in mind and not been so jarred every time it came up in the book (meaning every couple pages). Some of the reviews I have seen of this book were that people “should have known” because they should have looked up the publishing company or author and seen that it was a Christian company, and I disagree. I think that is something that should be disclosed somewhere in the bio of the book. I shouldn’t have to research all of my publishing companies and authors to determine whether or not I am going to be barraged with religious texts.
Religious aspects of this book aside, this still wasn’t a good book in my opinion. I was excited to read a series of twisted fairytales, and I was sorely disappointed. Even if I could handle all of the religion parts there was just zero character development, zero reasons for me to root for anyone, zero reason for me to keep going (other than it was only 200 some pages so giving up felt pathetic), and I just felt like this book had so much potential to be a great historical YA about Sleeping Beauty and it fell so flat.
So – this was an easy read, there are like 10+ books in this series, and it is very, very clean literature because it is *very* Christian. If you want to and are able to read this, more power to you; there are a lot of reviews on Goodreads of people who adore this series, this is just SO not my cup of tea, but it could definitely be yours. Give it a shot? Worst thing is you waste 3 hours of your life.
End result: 3 / 10
Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7826101-the-healer-s-apprentice