Chaos Tryst by Shirin Dubbin

A magical retelling of Goldilocks and the three bears. This is a novella, which for me I enjoy as short reads, but don't read them all that often because I like to really dive into a book and get lost in it for hours. But novellas also have their place, they are quicker reads, I think for those of us who don't have the time to immerse ourselves for hours in a longer book.

I would like to mention that the concept for this book is unique. The imagination alone required to take a simple fairytale and create a complex world to retell this story is quite remarkable. I would like to take time to acknowledge that.

Ari and Maks are the two main characters of this story. Ari is the modern representation of Goldilocks and Maks is one of the three bears. Ari is a retriever, who essentially just retrievers stolen property to their rightful owner and she is bound by a magical code. Ari meets Maks when she goes to retrieve something from Maks' home that she believes to be stolen, and that her magic shows to be stolen. However, the item in question has been in Maks' family since it's creation, which mean the two of them need to iron out who the rightful owner really is, which is how this story start off.

While this book is generally speaking a cute story, and truly unique it does have it's flaws. The story moves quickly (always a good thing), but at some point it starts to become confusing, and not in a good way.

In a lot of ways the story starts to begin feeling forced about half way through. As if the first half was a steady build up of events, and then the author realized it was a novella and not a book and just started through events together that would allow for the completion of the story.

The romance itself, that is a huge primary part of the novella, feel forced. The characters do not feel organic together, and they do not really feel like they have a lot of chemistry. I'm not really sure what element is missing between the two characters or how to go about fixing this issue, but it just doesn't feel right and feels forced.

Overall, the book is so-so. If you are looking for a quick read this might be a book for you, or if you are a person who likes the retelling of the stories you heard of as a child then maybe this is for you. Other than that I don't know of many people who are going to think this novella is a favorite.