What is hidden

I absolutely love magical stories that are on the brink of being fairy tales. The good and the evil, stories placed in worlds so different from the one I’m living in, fantasies of true love and happily ever afters. This world, our world, can be so cruel. Reading these types of stories gives me hope that there might be something beautiful out there for me as well and if not, well, at least I get to escape the real world for a moment. That is why What is hidden caught my eye.

In a land called Venesia, eighteen year old Evie work as a mask maker alongside her father. Every person in Venesia wears a mask to cover up their face, something they’ve done for a very long time. The masks doesn’t just hide a person’s face, but also tell the rank of the wearer. When people are punished for a crime they get their mask taken away from them and is left shackled up on a square for everyone to see. So when the notorious Chameleon, who steals masks and people’s identities, breaks into Evie’s home, takes all the masks in her shop, murder her father and brand Evie with his own Mark to frame her for the crime, everything is falling apart. Suddenly Evie has nothing, no home and no family and nowhere to go. But Evie is stubborn and doesn’t give up. Knowing that the Chameleon is going to get caught one day she goes into hiding at the royal palace while plotting how to get out of the mess he put her in and get her life back. But Evie soon learns that more than one secret is hidden behind the palace walls.

This is a novel I had great, great hopes for. It had such potential when I first heard about and I was instantly intrigued. It was promised to be something of a Cinderella story and I loved the idea of a society hiding behind masks and what happens if you suddenly lose the only thing you have to go anywhere and do anything in the city. But alas, I was very disappointed when I finished.

Already a few chapters in part of me feared that this wasn’t going to be as good as I’d hoped. The novel isn’t very long, not nearly 250 pages, and while you shouldn’t judge a story by how many pages it has it was absolutely impossible not to when the adrenaline from the first event had settled down and the book moved into a boring phase of the same event happening over and over again. And as I read, and the novel shrunk down, all I could think was “when will the explosion come?”. It was a long wait of cleaning plates and fighting practice and while reading that my mind worked out every possible outcome, so when I finally reached the part where things started to happen for real, I practically already knew what was going to happen.

The story starts slowly with getting to know Evie and her normal, every-day life. It then progresses to the attack on her home and how she sneaks her way into the palace and makes a new life there. For the longest of time (something like half the book) Evie just works as a maid in the kitchen, cleaning and serving, when she isn’t in her basement room with her good friend Aiden where he teaches her how to fight. This is something he believes she needs to know (and he has a point, but as I reader, I soon figured out that the skills he taught her was something that would pop up later in the book when the story drew closer to its conclusions, and I wasn’t wrong about that, either). It was dull though, to hear her doing the same thing week after week.

Now, during all this time when Evie is just waiting for news about the Chameleon so she can come out of hiding, one would think that she would mourn all that she lost. If I lost my family and my job and my home and my pet all in one night, I would be quite upset. But Evie just cries a few tears and shove it all away, thinking that if she lingers on it, she will break apart completely. She is on to something there, but I wonder, if someone goes through the same trauma as Evie did, can you just put it aside? Granted every person is different, but I still got really annoyed at the lack of reaction from Evie. She put it all behind her like it didn’t bother her in the slightest and what kind of messages does that send out? That you should magically get over the loss of a parent, the only home you’ve ever had and your entire future during one night? It might sound easy and nice to shove your feelings aside, but it’ll do you no good and I hated how easy it was for Evie to pretend that the life she lived in the palace was the life she’d always lived and that she wasn’t sad at all. It felt both like a lie and that she’d never cared about her father and thus neither for his death, which made me like her a lot less.

The only person who knows Evie’s real identity, when she moves into the palace, is her friend Aiden. He tries to help and support her all he can, but there was something with him that I didn’t like either, though in this case I’m not really sure what it was. He was nice, too nice, bordering on a push-over. If this was Cinderella, then Aiden would be the fairy godmother. If this was a TV-series set in our timeframe, then Aiden would be the friendzoned guy who is so obviously in love with the female lead character. I don’t really like the phrase “man up” but that’s really what I wanted him to do. And of course, in the end, he turned from the super nice, trusting best friend to a scared child to the knight in shining armor. There was not one part of Aiden that I liked. Except maybe his taste in dresses.

Another thing with the size of the novel that made me a bit worried beforehand was how the world building would be. Usually when a novel is short the author focuses on the story itself and ignores details like smells and clothes and weather, the things that makes the story come alive. I dislike that, when I read I want the full experience, I want so many details that I feel like I’m walking around in that world myself and I can feel the sun on my skin and the smell of salt water and hear the seagulls. Lauren Skidmore did not deliver enough details for me to feel like I was in the story, rather than just reading it. She did pay attention to the masks and how they looked and quite often the dresses as well, but not much more than that. I had a somewhat good view over the part of the palace where Evie lived, but when she walked around in new parts I usually found that we jumped from one hallway to another without me really knowing how we got there in the first place. The same went for the epic battle scene in the end. Somehow Evie and Aiden was surrounded by twenty armed men but still found a way to have a conversation while Aiden occasionally fought a man who came a bit too close.

Like I said in the beginning, I like fairy tales and especially retold ones, new versions of old classics. I have nothing against the romance, but I’m really bothered when cruel, harsh scenes, like fighting scenes, is getting overlooked by a love story that waited until the last minute to spark up. There’s nothing worse when a battle is belittled by the fair maiden crying out to the knight to watch out and simply standing there. Either she joins the battle and fight with the knight or she move over to a corner and shut up. There's a time and a place for everything and a sword fight really isn't the place to talk about all the secrets you've kept hidden for so long. If you’re going to have a battle in your story then write it the right way or leave it out all together.

As you surely can tell, this novel turned out to be nothing that made my heart skip a beat – rather the other way around. It had so much potential and yet it turned out to something so bleak. The whole story was weak, even the ending. There was no spark and no fight, neither in the story itself of in the characters. There’s not one part of me that wants to reread this book ever again.