Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

I currently have 285 unread books on my Kindle. To choose the next one to read, I scroll to a random spot and pick from one of the six books on that page. So it's odd when I get a series of books in a row with the same theme. It was only a month ago that I had two retellings of Beauty and the Beast in a row (Beast and Any House in a Storm), and now I had another retelling of Beauty and the Beast followed by a retelling of Mulan. I don't even like retellings...

Stormrise by Jillian Boehme. At first I thought this would just be a retelling of Disney's Mulan, but early on it went off in its own direction and never looked back (and it's even more different than the original story Disney's is based on, Hua Mulan). The only thing the two stories shared was that the main character (named Rain in Stormrise) pretended to be a man so she could join the army.

Unlike Disney's version, she was discovered pretty early on, but as the main plot was about her waking dragons to save the country, that only added to her trouble doing so.

The dragons were real Chinese dragons, not the little one in Disney's version. As much as I loved Disney's movie, this book was much better. Everything was more mature and realistic (especially about how she had to pretend to be a man -- Disney's Mulan never had to deal with her period!).

The ending was sweet. I don't usually seek out happy endings (my Discord status has been for years), but I really liked it in Stormrise's case.

DNF
71) The Servants and the Beast: In which the ones who saw it all tell the true tale of the Beast by multiple authors. What a pointless waste of a book this was. This story* felt like fanfic written by the most Disney's Beauty and the Beast movie-obsessed fans on the planet. (*Each chapter of the book was written by one of five authors. It felt more like an anthology, but they didn't call it that.)

All the stories/chapters in it were about the exact same scene from the movie: When the prince got turned into the Beast. The same exact scene over and over, as experienced by servants in various parts of the castle.

Do you love the movie so much that you want to know what every single background character, even the most minor ones, were doing at the time? (Spoiler: Mostly just gossiping.) Then this book is for you.