Looking past the style, the story deceived me into excitement. The language was simple and repetitive which is maybe allowable for children, but not on the level for teen readers. The book begins promisingly enough, hinting at, then divulging fragments of an origin story. Full disclosure, I was still singing along in my head. The dialogue of one chapter is literally just the lyrics from the song "Poor Unfortunate Souls". Then, the half that is about Ursula? It is the movie "The Little Mermaid", chewed up and regurgitated onto the page. Something to do with a continuing plot from the author's first two books, supposedly. The rest is some tangential plot of a princess Tulip and her witchy nanny? I don't know. Only half the story is directly focused on the sea witch. I expected something a little more unique and a little less borrowed. Having admitted that, I recognize that I may have gone into this story with hopes raised too high. She is, thus far, my all time favorite Disney villain. I am honestly shocked that Disney would allow their name to be attached to such a poorly constructed piece of work. The most difficult thing to follow is the flow of the story, as it constantly jumps around in time and place, with no real rhyme or reason. The dialogue is contrived and forced at times. The descriptions of people, places, and things are never enough to leave a lasting impression. Her character is poorly fleshed out, and Ariel is almost completely nonexistent in the story. Ursula really only makes cameo appearances throughout the book, and often she isn't even directly in the scene, but being observed from an enchanted mirror. At first I didn't find this to be a problem, but the more I realized this story is not actually about Ursula, and instead about the three witches and Tulip, the more frustrated I became.
To be fair, I had not read the first two books in the series, so I came in at the end of the story for the three odd sisters. When I try and think about anything redeemable this book offered, I come up blank. I don't think I have ever given a 1 star review on here before, but this book was so disappointing and poorly written, that I had no other choice.
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