Cloaked: 04/21/21

Cloaked by Alex Flinn is an urban fantasy set in South Beach, Miami, Florida. It blends together a half dozen fairy tales to cobble together a modern day quest by a shoe repairman for a princess and her cursed brother. While the basic plot is similar to Disney's adaptation of The Frog Princess by E.D. Baker (2002), the blending reminds me more of Gail Carson Levine's fantasies.

Johnny runs his mother's shop while she works a second job to keep the lights on. It happens to be inside the hotel that the Aloran princess is staying at. Of all the people present at her arrival, it's Johnny she takes a fancy to. By the end of her first day there, Johnny's been hired to track down the Aloran crown prince who has been turned into a frog somewhere in the Florida Keys.

In case anyone needs help figuring out which fairy tales are being used, each chapter opens with a quote from one of them. There's also a list of them in the afterword. For those familiar already with the stories, they are a fun hint of what's to come.

My one minor quibble with Cloaked is with the pacing. Once Johnny is given the magical means to travel, he ends up blipping from place to place, sometimes multiple places in the span of a few hours. There is very little in the way of segue from scene to scene. If I had been listening to Cloaked as an audiobook, I would have spent a lot of time rewinding to see how one scene lead into the next.

Four stars

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