Second Hand Curses

Executive Summary: I ended up enjoying this a lot more than I expected to. It wasn't as fun as his NPCs series but given that I'm not a big fairy tale fan, I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun he made it.Audiobook: I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the 3 narrator approach, but it seemed to work well. I'm not sure which of the male narrators was the primary, whoever voiced Jack, but they did a good job with the overall narration beyond just reading Jack's parts. Both other of the others did a good job as well. If Mr. Hayes writes a sequel, I hope they hire the same three again. It definitely worked well in audio.Full ReviewI really enjoy Drew Hayes [b:NPCs 22088245 NPCs (Spells, Swords, & Stealth, #1) Drew Hayes https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1400095217s/22088245.jpg 41426688] series, but I haven't read any of his other stuff before. There has been a bit of a trend to write modern fairy tales, or to repurpose traditional fairy tales. I've read a few and I enjoyed the show Grimm, but it's not something I was really itching for reading more of.I mostly picked this book up because it was on sale and a bit on the strength of his other books I've read. The majority of this book is episodic. Each chapter uses a classic fairy tale and puts a (often humorous) twist on it. I recognized most, but not all of the stories, but as I said fairy tales aren't really my thing.I tend to prefer a bigger story than something episodic like this, but it really seemed to work well, and he did still manage to build a pretty compelling glue story connecting them all together.My favorite part was learning the backstories of the three main characters. I had kind of guessed two of them, but one of them took me by surprise. It's possible if I knew fairy tales better, I'd have been less surprised but it's hard to say.Overall this was a pretty fun/light read and I'd definitely pick up another if he wrote it, but if not it ended in a pretty decent place.