Author: Sarah Mlynowski
Publisher: Random House
Rating: worthy!
This audio CD is read by Ariadne Meyers and she does an acceptable job, but is occasionally annoying.
Quite frankly, this one seemed a bit young for me, but I've never shied away from a novel for fear of embarrassment from its subject matter - only from fear of detesting one because it looked like it might be so awful I’d regret it! So this looked, from the blurb, like a fun read, but we all know how thoroughly blurbs lie. The vig was that I’d already read (read: listened) and enjoyed another one by this same author (Don't Even Think About It, so I decided to give it a try.
Once again it’s an unfortunate first person PoV story. I think such novels such have a government warning attached to them:
I nevertheless plunged recklessly on, and I started listening to it when one of my sons was in the car. While I wasn't impressed by the first chapter, he was. Hopefully he's going to drag himself away from his computer enough to read the paperback version I got for him, but I offer no guarantee.
Chapter two is better. This is where the story really begins and you can quite easily skip chapter one and start right here without missing a thing - unless you like rambling intros. There is some humor in it, a few laughs, but chapter one is like a prologue, and prologues, I detest. I resented that the author cheated and dragged me into reading her prologue by disguising it thus. And yes, I know advise authors to make their prologue chapter one instead of a prologue, but that advice carries the implicit assumption they have something useful to say in the prologue!
Chapter two is where the main character discovers that her younger sister has inherited her mother's witchcraft abilities. This power apparently travels only through the female line, of course, because nothing is more genderist than witchcraft. Also, there's no guarantee you'll get it. The main character doesn't, but her younger sister does. The very existence of witchcraft is a joke to the main character to begin with, but she quickly adapts when she realizes how much this can change her life for the better, only to be disappointed when her mom declares that using it only for pretty wish-fulfillment will lead to misery. Like she knows. There's no explanation, at least to begin with, as to why this should be so.
Her sister knew there was something different about her, but until her evil mom actually deigned to tell her she was a witch, she didn’t know what was going on. How a mother could abuse her daughter like this is a mystery, and honestly didn’t ring true to me, but it’s what you have to deal with. The young sister had resurrected her pet goldfish a few times, so she knew she had powers. This led to one of the most flat-out hilarious lines in the novel for me (but then I'm really warped). The narrator reads, "death and resurrection rigmarole", but she makes rigmarole sound like rigor-marole, as in rigor mortis. I don’t know if she did it on purpose, but she made me laugh out loud at that. I also found "The STB" (the name they give to their father's fiance - mom & dad are split up) an amusing way to refer to an un-liked "relative".
Unfortunately, I could not get into this novel. It was far too much whiny "Me! Me! Me!" from the main character and given that I detest the self-indulgence of main characters narrating their own story in the first place, this did not sit at all well with me. I found her story to be tedious, lacking in anything of interest, of no educational value, and with nothing new to say or to bring to the genre. So, I would normally rate this warty, but my son assures me it has merit, so I am going, for once, to use his rating and not mine! He rates this a worthy read. Blame him if you hate it!
