Author: Wendy Scott
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!
This is book one in the Lodestone series, because why publish one book and then create something brand new when you can milk the same tedious topic for an entire series? I am not a fan of series, as you can guess. They are, with very few and treasured exceptions, boring, and they are abusive in that they actively prey on reader addiction. I've seen readers review a book negatively and then admit that they're going to read the next in the series because they have to know what happens! How wrong-headed is that? People who write series are no different, on the bottom line, than drug pushers, and publishers and writers are okay with this and indulge themselves in it mercilessly. I am not on-board with that, and I am not an addict!
The title is about as unoriginal as you can get. Sometimes the publisher rips the right to title their own novel right out of the author's hands, so maybe it's not her fault, but BN lists thirteen pages of books when you type this title into their search engine, and the first page consists almost entirely of books sharing almost this exact title! As I quickly discovered, originality is not this novel's forte.
This book started out just fine - minor issues, but otherwise quite engrossing, until the shirtless guy showed up with his muscles rippling. Seriously? It was actually funny because he was brushing down a horse which had just arrived in the stable, and his own eyes were exactly like a horse's - brown with long lashes! Since this is a book of witchcraft, maybe the guy's a horse? Of course this begs the question as to what other traits he has and whether this is really a young adult novel about witchcraft or if it's simply YA erotica. I'm guessing it’s the former even as I continue to wonder about the wrong-headedness of this stuck-in-a-rut approach to stories about young girls (and I use the word 'rut' deliberately).
Seriously, though, the problem is that this is yet another in a long, long, way-too-long, line of books with a female main character who is presented as heroic, yet right up front the author starts telling us loudly that this girl is actually quite useless without a macho guy to validate her. Why would an author - especially a female author - do this to a girl? I have to say that this put me right off this book. Fortunately for the author, it had been interesting enough until that point for me to want to continue reading it, but I was definitely not pleased.
It certainly didn’t help at one point in chapter 4, we were explicitly told that, "Women are nature's sacred carriers, holding the precious seeds of future life, and are far closer to spiritual perfection than a man could ever be." Seriously? Please, get it right. Women carry half a seed of life; men carry the other half. Let’s not get disgustingly genderist about this. Women do carry that life in their bodies for nine months, and pay a hefty price for that. I don’t get this kind of writing: one which on the one hand puts women on a pedestal like this, and then on the other, renders them as air-headed, blushing, giggling, flibbertigibbets as soon as His Royal Majesty King Shirtless o' the Rippling Muscles shows up. A woman cannot intelligently be both a strong female character and a man's 'bit of skirt'.
What's almost as bad is that this is yet another Harry Potter clone: it's a school for witchcraft, with an orphaned child who is *special*. On top of that, it really bothers me that writers take up a fantastical and boundless topic like witchcraft, full of adventure and promise, and then hobble it by placing it into a rigidly mundane setting. Just like in Harry Potter, there's a council (like the Ministry of Magic) which controls the witches. Seriously? I don’t get the mentality whereby an author can take the supernatural and then treat it as the ordinary, with schools, and controls, and councils and - well in short, make it exactly like the mundane world. How unimaginative is that? The supernatural deserves better!
As if that's not bad enough, Sir Shirtless is suddenly man-handling Sabrina - the main character (Sabrina? Seriously? Let’s get some originality, please!). Instead of approaching her respectfully and standing away from her, advising her as to how to brush this particular horse, this creep is all over her, grabbing her hand like she's a little child - but then that's how this kind of jerk views women, isn’t it?
We read: "…strong fingers radiating warmth slipped over hers, and a musk-laden voice, breathed into her ear." It’s not even good punctuation. A musk-laden voice? What does that even mean? Is the author confusing husky and musky? There's clearly no concept of chivalry in this novel, so why not set as an example that it's okay to grab and manipulate women without even considering a need for permission, let alone actually asking for it. Clearly women don’t deserve that kind of respect in this world, any novel which doesn't respect women likewise doesn't deserve my time in reading it.
I rate this novel misogynistic. You can see from the covers of some of her other novels (such as Ferrasium, Golden Scarab, and Pyramidion), that either the author or her publisher is very much into the objectification of women. I'm starting to become convinced that such novels should be reviewed negatively without even reading them, based on the cover alone.
