break your glass slippers (ARC Review)

I fell in love with Amanda Lovelace’s poetry last year when I read the witch doesn’t burn in this one and the princess saves herself in this one. So when I saw that Lovelace was not only coming out with a new collection but that it was available on Netgalley…let’s just say I hit that ‘request’ button faster than Cinderella fled the castle at midnight. 

This collection is similar to the women are some kind of magic series and carries similar themes, but mostly focuses on relationships, as they begin and end and all the messy bits between. 

Unlike Lovelace’s other series, however, these verses are accompanied by gorgeous monochromatic illustrations. Like…tattoo-these-on-my-body-right-now beautiful.

I can’t say I didn’t have high hopes for this collection after loving the other books I’ve read by Lovelace so much.

But I also can’t say that they were all met…

Break Your Glass Slippers still had a lot of the elements that I loved so much about Lovelace’s earlier work: her ability to tell a full story from start to finish through verse, her creative use of the different pieces of a poem, and her feminist themes and inspiring moments. 

But it was missing the amount of literary allusion that I thought it would have, especially for a collection that focuses solely on one very well-known fairytale that had, in my opinion, presented plenty of opportunities. 

And, more so, I couldn’t help feeling while I read that many poems felt too familiar. Not that they were carbon copies of other parts of Lovelace’s work, but they were too similar to feel as fresh and meaningful as I wanted them to, especially considering that this is the start of a whole new series. 

I rated Break Your Glass Slippers 3.5 out of 5 stars and would still recommend it to fans of Lovelace’s other works.

Thank you to Netgalley and Andrew McMeels Publishing for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an honest review.