Title:Enchanted Ivy
Author: Sarah Beth Durst
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Length: 310 pages
It was the matte finish that got me. So many young adult fantasy novels have the glossy cover that screams: I’m complete brain candy and will rot your mind! READ ME! But not Enchanted Ivy, maybe you can’t tell from the picture, but if your fingers touch the cover, you’ll know.
Ivy here is a play on words. The main character, Lily Carter, is trying to get into Princeton (her back-up school is another Ivy League option: Harvard). No biggie, right? She just has to pass a top secret admissions test provided by the Old Boys her grandfather went to college with and she’s in…
Insert Tolkien and Harry Potter style creatures of myth… shape shifters, a gate to a magic world, gargoyle professors, unicorns, dryads, and ivy (and trees and flowers) that obey commands, and you’ve got the fixings for a fantastical adventure that occurs in a day or two and can be read faster than that.
Cassandra Clare meets C.S. Lewis and Sarah Beth Durst brought us a fun filled fantasy with a few romantic moments or two to satisfy our girly hearts.
When I read these books, I’m mentally cataloging them… will I recommend this to kids at the store? Will I recommend this to my niece? Will I recommend this to my daughter? For Enchanted Ivy, yes on all fronts, as long as their school work is done. The book is both exciting and innocent enough for tweens and teens, I enjoyed it, but I don’t feel like I wasted my time or killed brain cells in doing so. The author, after all, is a Princeton gal herself.
As for a few cheesy soulmate lines, I both loathe them and am a sucker for them. I met my husband when I was 14, all the first meetings and teenage hormones is sheer nostalgia for me. Although Durst does a great job at keeping these on the very far back burner.
