Rating: WARTY!
This is a 300 page novel in first person voice which is typically too much for me. This is why I ditched all my unread print books a while back, that were in first person. I guess I missed this one so I decided to give it a go and it didn't surprise me when it didn't work. It's also part of a series which doesn't help. It's one of those series where the author tries to get the one word incorporate din every title in the series. Usually it's a dumb-ass main character name. in this one, it was the word 'witch'. I'm not a fan of that peccadillo.
The problem that killed this for me though wasn't so much the first person, although that's typically hard to take. It was the idea that there's unremitting and unpunished bullying going on in school. I know there's some, but when it's conducted by girls, it tends to be a lot more subtle and devastating than the uncontrolled (and ridiculous) classroom version depicted here. I don't know where this author got her ideas from - bad YA stories I guess, but that was the end of reading this for me. . On top of that, what's the point in making your detective a witch if she refuses to employ witchcraft to solve the crime? Admittedly your story would be short-lived if it were only a matter of casting a spell or two, to solve the crime every time, but an inventive writer would find ways around this.
It wasn't just that predictable crap, though. The story was all over the place, and it kept meandering off into uninteresting diversions. I know you have to let your character grow, but if the growth pains are that bad, I'd rather have an undeveloped character and a decent story than this. I grew bored and irritated, and that classroom bullying thing was just the last straw. The bottom line is that it was just bad and lazy writing, and I can't commend this based on the small portion I managed to get through
