In the Coils of the Snake by Clare B. Dunkle

I picked this book up because it was a bargain book, on sale for under two dollars, at my campus bookstore. It had a pretty cover, and the plot about humans, elves, and goblins seemed interesting. It's juvenile/YA; grades 6-10 according to Amazon. It is also the third book in the Hollow Kingdom trilogy- I have not read the others, and I am about to spoil the ending of this one. Be warned.

As the book started out, I was really impressed! The plot was about a girl who was going to marry a goblin. This is not something you see everyday. The background is that the Goblin King has to marry a human or an elf, for some magical reason. The Goblins in the book are sufficiently goblin-esque, but doughty, with a sense of honor, and likeable characteristics. The fact that a girl had been raised to think of the Goblins as wonderful, raised to be their queen, was a pretty interesting concept. Different, and pleasant. I wanted that to work out for her. There should be an appropriate number of hardships, to make the book interesting, but I really wanted this arranged marriage thing to work. For the novelty of it all. (Here's a YA medieval fantasy where a girl escapes to, rather than from, her arranged marriage. I remember enjoying it.)

Then, enter the elves. The prissy, beautiful, oh-so-perfect and perfectly sickening elves. Long story short, it's magically better for a goblin king to marry an elf than a human, so the Goblin-King drops his bride-to-be in favor of a kidnapped elf girl who doesn't want him- traded by her king for another magical reason. The original human girl, Miranda, runs away from the goblin caves and is taken into captivity by the elves. A for-your-protection form of captivity, where she is treated ever so perfectly and everything is ever so nice, and she falls in "love" with the elf king. It was like Twilight all over again- he was beautiful and sparkly and smotheringly overprotective, and he gets the girl. A few more things happen, the end.

I felt gypped.

Maybe I could have dealt with it, but the "romance" was entirely unbelievable. He treated her like a child, she eventually decided she liked it, and they fell in "love." And she was meant to be the Goblin Queen. She was meant for so much more.

In the author's defense, I did some research on the series and discovered that the first two books actually take place far before Miranda's time- and that the first book is, indeed, about a human who marries a goblin. So perhaps the author had already written the book I wanted to read. I'll have to find out. Maybe the third book was more of a political wrap-up in her mind, something that had to take place for the elves and goblins of her world, and she let the characters and romance suffer to follow her agenda. Also, maybe if I'd read it when I was younger, I too would have fallen for the beautiful and boring elves.