This is a wannabe young adult novel, but the main character is only fifteen, which technically is young adult territory for better or for worse, but it felt more like middle grade reading this stuff. Inevitably, it's written in first person, and it's about Evelynn Marston who is quite obviously a witch, but who is in serious denial.
Her denial makes as little sense as her name - who calls their child Evelynn these days? It's not even in the top 70 names for children born in 2005. Despite being hit over the head with her power repeatedly, 'Evie' still doesn't believe. This tells me that she's both stupid and tediously incurious and I have no interest in reading even one novel, let alone a series, about a shallow girl who has no interest in exploring her own potentially magical abilities.
I would have DNF'd this were it not so short. It's more like a novella than a novel despite it proudly declaring itself to be a novel on the cover (did the cover designer really believe that we'd think it was non-fiction without the bright red lettering telling us it was a novel?! ). In reality it's nothing more than a prologue, and I don't do prologues. Worse, it was all prologue and nothing of substance; quite literally nothing of interest or value happens in these 160 or so pages. It's barely even a witch novel because Evie doesn't do any actual witchcraft to speak of.
There's a handful of accidental displays of possible magic, every one of which is disputed by Evie and is quite easily dismissible. There are a couple of minor dumb spells she tries on purpose which are of the stupid rhyming English variety, like if you say a poem over a candle, magic happens! I'm sorry but that's juvenile and pathetic. Never is there any point at which Evie has the smarts to question any of this or to ask herself why, if she can cause magic without saying a word (like in burning something down) does she need to go through these ridiculous and childish rituals to do a spell?
The story moves ponderously slowly and like an idiot, I kept reading on waiting for Evie to unleash herself, but she never did! It's like one of those joke cards that on one side says, "How do morons pass their time? (see other side) and on the other side, it says exactly the same thing. In that same way, the story went nowhere and in the end, I resented wasting my time reading it. To employ a sexual vernacular, it will leave you blue-balled! That's not inappropriate because (quite symbolically I think, if perhaps unintentionally!), Evie actually wears a blue gown to a ball! The only good thing I can say about it (the story, not the gown!) is that it was short and the first person actually wasn't as irritating as it usually is for me, but this character is so lacking in agency and smarts that she's certainly not worth following a series about.
It's your predictable YA fish-out-of-water story, with Evie having to attend a new school after having been accused of burning down the science lab in her previous school, but from this point onward, the impression is that Evie is literally strait-jacketed into doing things without anyone caring what she herself wants. You'd think at some point she'd rebel and her witch powers would manifest, but no. I kept waiting for it to happen, but it never did. I also found it very weird that such a small town sported not one, but three high schools, two of which were private ones.
This dick of a guy named Dylan, who Evie vaguely knows because he's friends with her best friend's brother, is two or three years older than Evie and he treats her like dirt when she first arrives at the new school: not even saying a word to her and then suddenly, he's all over her and she's perfectly fine with his manhandling of her, touching her, and kissing her without even asking and without any history whatsoever of their being together, or dating.
For example, I read, "Dylan stood behind me, resting his elbows on my shoulders and his chin on the top of my head," and later, "He chuckled and took hold of my hand," and "He lowered his lips to mine in a gentle kiss." This is when the two of them are barely involved in any way. In short, Evie is a doll, and not in the old fashioned 'complimentary' sense. She's not really an autonomous person, and he's a possessive closet rapist who improbably soon begins talking about marriage. Meanwhile she also has Josh, her best friend's brother, on a string, making the depressingly predictable, tediously unoriginal, and utterly boring YA triangle.
I know that authors don't get to choose their own covers or blurbs when they publish with a professional publisher, but when I read something like this in the book description I have problems with it: "When Evie's friend, Lauren Silver, turns up dead, Evie must rely on all her newfound powers and friends to find the truth. But bringing a killer to justice may require stronger magic and true love, the kind that can't be found in a potion."
There are so many issues with this it's hard to know where to start. First, Lauren isn't her friend, she's an acquaintance who Evie barely knows and has met only once. Second, when Lauren is killed, instead of going to the police Evie starts sneaking around to hide some sneakers (LOL!) which she accidentally left at Lauren's house during their one encounter. Later she breaks into Lauren's home to steal something. Secondly, what newfound powers? Evie is in denial and doesn't believe she has any powers, so how can she "rely on all her newfound powers"? The book description is sheer bullshit.
Thirdly, "bringing a killer to justice may require...true love"? What's that all about? There is no true love here. And why must Evie have true love? Because she's too weak on her own and needs some guy to manhandle and validate her? Why do female authors persistently infantilize and demean their female characters like this? If Evie wanted to bring a killer to justice she would have immediately gone to the police and reported being attacked on her way home one night instead of waiting and waiting, oh, and waiting before she actually did report it, and then only when urged to by others.
And about that cat? After Evie visits Lauren's house under cover of darkness to retrieve her sneakers, a black cat that used to belong to Lauren, follows her home and will not leave. I kept waiting for the cat to do something, or to be acknowledged as her familiar. or something! But. It. Never. Happens. So what is the freaking point of bringing this cat into the story? Finally, the villain was a weak one, and I found it hard to believe that this person would not have been found out long before they revealed themselves.
There were some writing errors/problems in the story (and from what I've read, there were apparently more, but some at least appear to have been corrected. The only really bad one I noticed was: "What do you think they what?" where clearly that last word should have been 'want'. Where Lauren's possessions were referred to, they were improperly apostrophe'd: "Lauren Silvers' scrapbooks" as opposed to "Lauren Silvers's scrapbooks." 'Silvers' is a name, not a plural.
And here is a fifteen-year-old speaking in first person: "I knew that Bree shouldn't mandate whom I did and didn't like...." Who the hell speaks like that, especially at fifteen? It may be technically correct, but it's tiresome, and no one says 'whom' except the most pretentious of people, and writers who are so obsessed with correctness that they even put it into the mouths of their characters when it couldn't stand out more than the sore thumb it sucks like. It's time for 'whom' to retire. Really.
At one point in the story, a person is injured and a nurse came out to see if there were any family to share a status update with. 'Uncle Mitch' who is not remotely related to the hospitalized person steps forward and says, "I want to be a family member, does that count?" and then we read, "The nurse grinned" and she said, "Sure. Follow me." No. Just no! I've known many nurses and they are fiercely protective of their patients and not a one of them would ever have invited a stranger in or given out personal information about a patient to 'Uncle Mitch'.
Another issue was the obsession with beauty evident in this novel. Again this is a female writer and she's obsessed with looks, as though a woman or a girl can have no other value. Repeatedly I read things like: "...but I did pick out a very young and very beautiful Mrs. Fox." "No, you're beautiful." "...a Brazilian beauty." "You look beautiful." "Looking both beautiful and terrifying..." "Lauren was so beautiful." "Lauren was a beauty queen." "Lauren had a fragile, almost eerie beauty." "She was beautiful too."
It's far too much. Given the many shortcomings of this novel, I have to say it's a warty, not a worthy.
