DNF Review--Roses & Bones by Francesca Lia Block

What happens when a girl finds herself at the crossroads between worlds—where the angels and ghosts, gods and demons, and beauties and beasts of myth are real? What does she do and who does she become?

Roses & Bones captures the best Francesca Lia Block has to offer: extravagantly imaginative tales, dark landscapes, fierce poetry, and storytelling that is nothing short of magical.

I've had this on my shelf for awhile and Roses & Bones was the second book of Francesca Lia Block's that I read. Although, I couldn't seem to get into this one.

I had got it from Bookperk when I was getting Abandon, and thought why not! The mythology and fairy tales really grabbed at my attention, I totally though this was going to be the book for me. Only it wasn't.

There's 3 books in this and I read the first one, Psyche in a Dress, which was in a sort of poetry like format. Not normal novel paragraphs at least. It was a sort of mesh of Greek myths from Psyche and Eros and Persephone and Hades and other Greek myth pieces. It was interesting, yet a little hard to read. For when I see the "poetry" like format, my brain automatically tries to find a rhythm from my school years.

The next story Echo was where my attention started to wan. The perspectives were very scattered, at first I was fine because Echo was the storyteller, but then it jumped around in the story telling, but still had the characters from within. I think one section was a flashback from another character, but then we jump back to Echo and at the time I didn't know that. A whole new story was going on with Echo. It was just confusing, and then it goes onto a character we haven't met but then Echo meets him to tie it back into the story. I was just so lost I gave that one up.

The next one was The Rose and the Beast, this had a collection of shorter stories that were supposed to be the fairy tales retold sort of thing. I didn't even make it through the first one. It was called "Snow" so it was following the threads of Snow White in a way, but after spending so much time reading Echo, my brain just wasn't into it so I ended up stopping the book entirely.

This was a DNF for me and one of the firsts that I had in awhile, maybe someday I'll go back to the last segment and try it again, but I really don't know. The book sounded like it was going to be interesting, but it just wasn't for me. The mythic and fable-ic (Not really a word, but you get it) elements weren't really strong in the last ones. At least not that I could see, so it was a letdown for me. It does still have the same contemporary feel of I Was a Teenage Fairy, that one I read years ago and liked pretty good. When I still read some contemporaries at least, although since there was a fairy not sure if you could call it contemporary. The paranormal or in this case "mythic" elements just weren't strong enough for my UF tastes.