There wasn’t a fairy godmother or any of that. And even though I fell in love along the way, what happened to me is unlike any fairy tale I’ve ever heard. Before I knew it, I was spying with a flock of enchanted swans, talking (yes, talking!) to a fox named Todd, and nearly trampled by giants in the Everglades.
Don’t believe me? I didn’t believe it either. But you’ll see. Because I knew it all was true, the second I got cloaked.”-goodreads
I really like Alex Flinn’s modern takes on fairy tales, and this is no exception. Cloaked is different than Flinn’s previous fairy tale related books, as rather than the book focusing on one or two mainstream sorts of fairy tales, the book contains elements from a lot of different, lesser-known fairy tales. I never would have known that, the book didn’t seem like it was slapped together, the plot was combined rather seamlessly. It was very interesting, probably more so that her other books, just in the way that you didn’t really know what to expect since it’s not like a fairy tale you’ve ever heard of.
Cloaked was not what I expected it to be. Looking back to before I read the book, I’m not particularly sure what I did expect. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but the book just seems a little different then the description. I’m having a really hard time articulating this, sorry. I think the description made Johnny, our protagonist, sound a lot like Jack from A Kiss in Time or a bit like Kyle from Beastly. He was a little bit similar, but I also thought he was a lot different, if nothing else, because Jack seemed a little bit cocky at times just like Kyle. Confident. Johnny wasn’t like that. It made the whole story seem a bit different from Flinn’s other fairy tale books. This could be my imagination, but this review is for my opinion, right? It wasn’t a bad thing, either, just something to note.
Other than that, while telling a different story, I felt that Cloaked was very similar to Flinn’s other fairy tale adaptions. I felt Cloaked shared the same strengths and probably the same weaknesses as Beastly and A Kiss in Time. I don’t mean this in a bad way as if I felt that I was reading the same thing or that it was boring, they’re just similar. Overall, I enjoyed Cloaked and recommend it to anyone looking for a not-so-traditional fairy tale, as I recommend Alex Flinn’s other books. I also really want to read Breaking Point, as it’s a contemporary un-related to fairy tales (Alex Flinn has several of those.) and I’m interested to see how it is!