Review: Cloaked by Alex Flinn


I’m not your average hero. I actually wasn’t your average anything. Just a poor guy working an after-school job at a South Beach shoe repair shop to help his mom make ends meet. But a little magic changed it all.

It all started with the curse. And the frognapping. And one hot-looking princess, who asked me to lead a rescue mission.

There wasn’t a fairy godmother or any of that. And even though I fell in love along the way, what happened to me is unlike any fairy tale I’ve ever heard. Before I knew it, I was spying with a flock of enchanted swans, talking (yes, talking!) to a fox named Todd, and nearly trampled by giants in the Keys.

Don’t believe me? I didn’t believe it either. But you’ll see. Because I knew it all was true, the second I got CLOAKED.

After reading Flinn's Beastly a few years ago, I was massively looking forward to reading Cloaked, I love the way Flinn manages to put numerous fairytales into one story and I was honestly expecting something amazing out of it.
DId I get what I was looking for?

In some ways, yes. I love how easy Flinn's writing is to read. It's the type of story you don't need to get too absorbed into, as it isn't that deep. For some people this may be a flaw but I think that easy reading is essential sometimes, and that is exactly what Cloaked is.

It incorporates a lot of fairy stories, such as The Six Swans, The Frog Prince, The Elves and the Shoemaker and a lot more, as well as having some fairytales that I don't know. I was so excited to see how Flinn would handle this. Problem was, I wasn't really captivated. Sure, I enjoyed the book well enough, I read it in a couple of hours, but I was more coasting, not absorbed, the writing was fantastic, kudos to Flinn for getting into the teenage male psyche, but that teenage male just wasn't interesting enough. Johnny was just too... nice for me to like. He wasn't funny, or snobby.... he didn't really have any addictive features at all, and all the quotes about shoes REALLY annoyed me. Yes Flinn, we are aware that Johnny is a shoemaker, don't keep shoving it in our faces.

Meg was a nice enough character, I think Flinn aimed for her to be a bit of a plain ol' action girl, but she just came across as the girl-next-door, and her storyline twist at the end was soooo predictable. I could see their romance developing slowly but it just seemed so... one dimensional? It's a typical unrequited love which turns out to be requited at the end, and I was expecting it so much I was barely even interested in the romance.
I think the only character I did like was Todd, the fox (hehe the Disney movie Fox and the Hound has a fox called Todd!), and even his *shock* twist at the end was soooo forseeable!

The storyline wasn't amazing either- a poor boy who works real hard is enlisted by a European princess to help find her brother who has been frognapped and is given a magic cloak with which he can teleport anywhere he wants to. On his way he meets a wicked witch and her son, a talking fox/rat/six swans, a kindly biker and finds love. Typical fairytale storyline and it wasn't convincing; granted, its a fairytale, it isn't going to be convincing BUT he could have made it a little bit more believable, considering it's supposedly set in contemporary times.

All together, a decent read for sitting and relaxing, but don't bother if you're after anything too deep.

Overall rating: D

Book was released February 11th 2011 by HarperCollins
I borrowed this book from the library.


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