Rating: WARTY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This book was a bit too much like the trope clones that came predictably rolling in post Harry Potter. Unless the author is really going to make an effort to bring something new to the table - something different, something original - then really, what's the point? I know this is aimed at middle grade (and read like it was) and I'm certainly not the intended audience, but to have witches waving sticks and chanting in Latin or worse, chanting in rhyming English, is so old and trite now that it's really not worth reading. Making your protagonist a female Harry Potter and doing the same thing with your villain isn't changing it up enough to get close to an original story.
The worst thing about this novel was the Salem angle. The Salem witch nonsense has been done to death and really, does it show any respect for the poor women who were murdered back then on the blatant religious lie that they were witches? No, it does not. It's shameful to keep dragging that out of the closet. For goodness sake let those poor women rest in peace. Even if the story had been brilliant, it would have tedious to read yet another witch story that tries to set its roots in Salem, but the story wasn't that interesting.
I didn't finish this, but the idea seemed to be that of a long-standing grudge, and so the question became: why was it so long-standing? Why didn't this evil witch carry out her revenge three or four hundred years ago? Why now? There seemed to be no answer to that, unless one popped-up in the very latter part of the story, and even if it did, what was the point of this revenge? It occurred to me that unless this person intended to reincarnate those victims from centuries ago in the bodies of her juvenile witch recruits, this revenge really offered her nothing, and even if she was planning on some reincarnation routine, the question of why now - at this time rather than a few hundred years ago still lacked a good answer.
So for these and other reasons, I quickly grew tired of a story that felt like one I'd read many times already, but under different covers and by different authors, so I did not finish it. I can't commend it based on what I read. There were too may tropes and too many clichés.
