A Whole New World with Y --- Jafar as Sultan?

I am a huge Disney fan and have been wanting to read the Twisted Tales series for the longest time. I just kept buying them as they came out, telling myself I would pick them up eventually and give my Disney heart something to sing about.

I FINALLY picked up the first installment of the series, which happens to be a re-telling of my FAVORITE Disney movie; Aladdin. 

A Whole New World is a twist on the class (and best) Disney film. In this version, Jafar gets, and keeps, the lamp after Aladdin retrieves it, locking Aladdin in the Cave of Wonders. What ensues is a hell of a lot of chaos and Jafar takes on as the new, and very evil, Sultan of Agrabah. 

The first 75 pages or so is a direct copy of the Aladdin movie from 1992. It is literally the movie word for word, which caused a lot of people to DNF. However, if you keep reading, you will see how the story drastically changes from the loved cartoon. 

There were a few things that this story brought that was interesting to me:

1. We get to meet Aladdin's mother in the prologue. In the movie, we know nothing of Aladdin's parents besides the fact that they are dead and Aladdin is basically an orphan. In this story we see who his mother was and the story about his father. It gave Aladdin some more character depth and explained some of his behaviors that we associate him with. 

2. Aladdin has two friends; Duban & Morgiana who are also "Street Rats" (cue in the song that is now forever stuck in my head, One Jump Ahead). Duban and Morgiana play important roles in this story in overtaking Jafar's ruling. I thought it was a nice touch to have some sidekicks for Aladdin, instead of him taking on the battle himself.

3. There is no Prince Ali (obviously). I liked seeing how Aladdin would have won over Jasmine and his role in the palace had he not figured out that the lamp was actually magical and contained a Genie. 

Overall, I thought this was a cute read and an intresting alternative to the popular story and cartoon of Aladdin. Was there times I was frustrated with what was happening? Yes of course, because I love Aladdin the way that it is so when you take something I love and change it, I'm not going to be happy. But alas, that is the entire POINT of this story and the series itself so I had to check myself. 

The audience is definitely very YA-ish and written for younger audiences, which was pretty obvious with the writing style. It benefited me in the end, because it made the story that much easier to get through but also had me bored at some points because I was past the reading level that it was made for.

 I do plan on reading the other Twisted Tales because I think it's a fun idea. I am interested to see if the other two authors who write in this series (Elizabeth Lim & Jen Caloneta) have similar writing style of Liz Braswell in A Whole New World.

Rating: 3 stars (I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it)