Review:: Fables: Storybook Love, by Bill Willingham

Title: Fables: Storybook Love

Author: Bill Willingham

Series: Fables, #3

Format: Paperback

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one. I mean, it was enjoyable, but the romance subplot felt really, really forced and squicky. The comic relief felt poorly timed and I felt like Bill Willingham didn't address most of the issues he laid out. It's like they were laid out just to be edgy.

Gonna stop me from going forward?

Nope.

So far, there's been a lot of pressure towards a Bigby/Snow White pairing. Everyone keeps pointing out how they're clearly a thing and whatnot. But there's never any reason in the way they're portrayed together that makes me think they'd be anything but friends.

Naturally, that needs to be fixed.

Basically, we find out that Snow White's smell is so alluring to Bigby that he can't ignore it. Oh, and they had sex. But they were under the influence of amnesia magic or something and so don't remember it and this isn't portrayed as squicky at all, just yanno, annoying.

I do still enjoy Goldilocks, and am interested to see if she doesn't stay dead... after all, as Bigby pointed out, she's a rather popular character. But again, she's another sign of how things just seem to be thrown in for the edginess rather than for any real reason.

I don't know.

There were some pretty epic scenes and things I really liked. It's just harder to ruminate on them when I felt like a big portion of it was so problematic. I guess it averages out to a 2-star review because it's somewhere between a 1 and a 3.