Poor Unfortunate Soul: A Tale of the Sea Witch by Serena Valentino
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love Ursula, but, alas, this was not the Ursula novel I desperately wanted it to be.

What annoyed me about the book was that it was not a “standalone,” which I really feel like the books in this villain series should be in order to give each villain’s potentially complex backstory and motives their full due. About half the book was focused on follow-up to events from the previous book in the series, The Beast Within: A Tale of Beauty’s Prince, which I wasn’t really invested in. Overall, it felt more as if the author was more interested in continuing the story with the auxiliary characters that she had made up for the series than really delving into Ursula’s story, which felt somewhat tangential to the story Valentino seemed to REALLY want to tell about the “odd sisters” machinations regarding the various villains in the Disney-verse. Overall, this gave the book a somewhat disjointed feel of two stories being told in parallel, one about Ursula’s perspective of The Little Mermaid, one about Valentino’s own characters that never appear in the Disney movies and thus don’t garner a ton of investment from me.

Despite these issues, I still gave the book three stars because the parts that were focused on Ursula’s backstory, especially her relationship with King Triton, were well done. The book was also a fun, quick read and an enjoyable bit of escapism. The writing is passable, and despite my disappointment with this series (and other Disney novel spinoffs overall), I know I will keep reading them because, well, Disney.

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