The Seventh Blessing

Title: The Seventh Blessing
Author: Melissa Buell
Publisher: The Little Things (TLT) Publishing
Pages: 269
ISBN: 978-0-9844013-5-2

Synopsis: Unlike most royal eighteen-year-old girls, Samantha finds it difficult to be a prim and proper princess. When she discovers her seven fairy blessings that were bestowed at her birth are a lie, her entire world is turned upside down. Although she can forgive the feuding fairies who made this large error on her behalf, she must find a way to control her real blessings--which may be more trouble than its worth.

Things start to become complicated when her best friend's brother becomes seriously injured just weeks before the annual knight competition. Samantha realizes the only way to help him and his family is to enter the competition by disguising her true identity. Balancing her mandatory princess lessons while hiding her secret blessings on top of this becomes difficult, but things begin to get challenging when Prince Nolan, a childhood friend, reenters her life. Samantha, bitter about their constant bickering relationship, suddenly begins to see Nolan in a new, and often confusing, light.

But when she finds out her seventh blessing has yet to be decoded from the ancient tongue, Samantha's most dangerous quest of all is discovering the true power her real blessings hold. Now, the fate of herself, her future, and her kingdom lie in her hands.

 I will start with the positives of this books first.
First, Samantha is a strong, courageous girl who likes being different. She is happy she isn't like her cousin who is only about dresses and who she will marry. Samantha delights in her differences from the other princesses in the land, and her father encourages her. She relies on herself and not on the hopes that a man will get her out of a situation. She is a strong female character, unlike some I have read...I think y'all will know who I'm talking about.

I also enjoyed the fairy aspect of the story. The children of this land are blessed by the fairies. The amount of blessing they receive depends on the month that they were born in. If the child was born in January, the child would receive one blessing and if the child was born in December, the child would have twelve. The fairy blessings reminded me a bit of Sleeping Beauty and the three fairies giving princess Aurora her three blessings when she was born. These blessings would become some of the most prominent parts of who they are. It was a nice whimsical part in the book.

Now, on to the negatives.
The story idea I liked. That is what drew me to this book. I love fairy tales. However, I just couldn't connect with the characters. At times, it read like a children's chapter book with the way that certain sections were so short in the chapters. The characters didn't feel as constructed as they could be. Samantha was a strongly built character, till the end when she started to cry quite a bit in the end. It deviated from who she was. And Samantha's mother the queen seemed very one dimensional.

The flow of the story was off to me as well. It just seemed disjointed, so it was easy for me to lay this book down for a time and not be anxious to pick it back up again. The villain of the story just didn't fit and the wrap up happened very quickly. In the end, I felt like this was trying to be a Sleeping Beauty/Harry Potter Mash-up. 

One final thing...in the printing, there were several mistakes. As I was reading, where something is being spoken about in past tense, for one word it jumped to the present. There were also a few misspelled words. Instead of "as" it appeared as "was".

It's a maybe. 
2 1/5 out of 5