Buy It: From Titan Books for £7.99 from 5th July
**WARNING: The review below contains mild spoilers about the book and the first season of Once Upon A Time.**
The Blurb: Emma Swan's life has been anything but a fairy tale. She's been on her own since she was abandoned as a baby--that is, until the night of her twenty-eighth birthday, when Henry, a ten-year-old boy, shows up on her doorstep. He's the son Emma gave up for adoption, and this surprise visit turns her life upside down. Henry takes Emma back to his home in Storybrooke, Maine, where, Henry claims, all the residents are actually fairy tale characters who can't remember their true identities. And if Henry's right, that means that his sweet-natured, lonely schoolteacher Mary Margaret Blanchard is really Snow White, the iconic princess ... and also Emma's long-lost mother.
Our Verdict: Reawakened is, essentially, a novelisation of Season 1 of Once Upon a Time, told entirely from the perspectives of Emma and Mary Margaret/Snow. It’s reasonably well-written, and fairly engaging. But if you're looking for anything additional to the TV show, you won’t find much of that here.
Many of the stories from Season 1 are missing. For the most part, only stories directly involving Emma or Mary Margaret/Snow are included - except for the couple of occasions where Henry tells Emma a story from the book to catch the readers up. Unfortunately this does mean many of the fairytale back stories are omitted entirely and some events in Storybrooke are glossed over or unexplained which may be frustrating to a reader who isn’t familiar with the series and wants to read this as an intro to the show. Oddly, the author chooses to use the episode titles as chapter titles, which doesn’t always work - for instance in the chapter 'What Happened to Frederick?' there is no mention of the character of Frederick whatsoever.
What you do get that's additional to the series, however, are Emma and Mary Margaret’s thoughts. For fans of the show, it’s quite nice to see what Mary Margaret really thought of Doctor Whale before and after their one night stand, her inner struggle to stay away from David, and Emma’s train of thought as she starts to care for Henry and gets to know the residents of Storybrooke. When Henry is comatose and she finally starts to realise all the stories he’s been telling her are true - and who she really is. There are also a couple of dream sequences that we didn’t see in the show, and slightly more detail on certain events, which almost serve as deleted scenes.
Given that the book focuses on those two characters, we rather hope the intention is to release more books from other points of view. We'd be very interested to read a novelisation based around Regina or Gold, for instance, both to get an insight into their trains of thought and delve deeper into their back-stories, glossed over in this book but extremely important to the show as a whole. That said, for fans of the show, this book is a nice keepsake to have, and a pleasant, easy read - especially as the cover is so pretty.
GG♥SF rating: ♥♥♥♥♥
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