The Orphanage of Doom by Isabella Fontaine (The Grimm Chronicles #4)

School has started! And the delicate balancing act Alice has been doing is about to start crashing. Not now, though, that will start in book five. But here, you can see the different pressures that Alice has to face.

One of the pressures being school. Alice's friend Trish is trying to get Alice to be popular again, but seriously, after you've been fighting all sorts of monsters, are you going to let an immature brat boss you around and tell you what friends you should unfriend from facebook? I didn't think so. I do think, though, that it gets much worse in the next book.

Also, this book is the first that features two Corrupted. Or rather, two Corrupted battles in one go. One is about music (who wants to guess the fairytale?) and the other is about the titular orphanage (this one is really hard to guess). In fact, I would say that the storyline involving music is the pre-dominant storyline.

Carrying on from Book three, Seth continues to play a bigger part in the series. In fact, it's almost as though he's Alice's partner (along with Briar). Also coming from Book three (with a mention in Book two!) is the dwarf Sam. You remember Sam, good-ole-heart-of-greed Sam. He's quite amusing here (not very scary though).

We're also introduced to a new character - Chase. Right now, we're just given his backstory, but he's probably going to play a significant role as the series goes on.

And as the series goes on, the Corrupted get more and more fleshed out. I like how there are Corrupted that aren't evil yet. They all acknowledge that they will turn evil one day, but for some, that day has not come. It's quite sad that most of them have to "die" after their encounter with Alice.

And tomorrow: the blog-tour post you've all been waiting for - Book Five in this series!

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the authors in exchange for a free and honest review.