“Evil Thing” from the Villains Series – A Disney Nerds Book Club Review

This month for the Disney Nerds Book Club Review, we’re talking about “Evil Thing” from Serena Valentino. This is the seventh book in Valentino’s villains series and it’s taking a new turn.

First thing first, we are learning more about Cruella from Cruella herself.

This book is based in the “real” world not the fairy tale world that we’ve experiences in the previous books. Now, that world isn’t completely gone from this tale. Cruella grows up with a favorite fairy tale book which details the story of Princess Tulip, who is a part of several other books from this series. I found this a good way to bring the previous books into this one because they’ve all been intertwined previously. I wasn’t sure how they were going to connect Cruella’s world to the world we’ve been exploring since the first book.

Cruella begins her story when she was a child and we learn about her relationship with her mother and father. Her father seems to be a loving, doting father. He even gives her the jade earrings that become a staple to her fashion look. On the other hand, her mother is not the best and most loving mother. What I found interesting is that Cruella didn’t always see it that way. I thought it was a great writing style to read how Cruella saw her life a pretty much prefect but might have been the case based on reactions of people around her. As in most cases, there is much to learn about Cruella as a child and it helps us understand how she becomes the villain we meet in “101 Dalmatians.”

The story does go into Cruella growing up and even becoming an adult. We even learn why she’s always wearing the iconic outfit with the fur coat that we all know. I personally enjoyed seeing that Cruella wasn’t always evil (like we learn about with the other villains in the other books of this series). I also enjoyed that we moved into a different world. Just because Cruella doesn’t live in the fairy tale world that we’ve explored previously, doesn’t mean that we don’t want to know more about her.

After reading “Evil Thing,” I am excited for which villains we learn more about in the next book! This series just keeps getting better!