The Curse of the Bruel Coven by Sabrina Ramoth

Rating: WARTY!

This story comes larded with a lot of trope, but it is YA, so that's par for the course unfortunately. There's very little under the sun that's new in YA, especially when it comes to supernatural tales. The story is short and fast-paced; perhaps too fast for some readers, but I liked that it did not not ramble and meander. If it had, I probably would have DNF'd it.

While this novel avoided some of the pitfalls in the genre, it could not seem to keep itself from falling headlong into the middle of others. For those reasons - which I shall go into shortly - and for the fact that it is the start of a series, which means that at best, it's only a prologue and not an actual story, and so has no resolution, I can't commend it. It's not exactly a cliff-hanger ending, but it's close. I will not be pursuing this series.

The first cliché to curse this story is that of the orphaned teenager suddenly coming into a realization and/or suddenly coming into her powers. "Vivienne Davenport is an ordinary teenager - at least, she thinks she is. Then the untimely death of her mother reveals a family secret. She's adopted... and her real mom is a witch." Yeah. Not a story-killer of a cliché, but there's certainly not anything new or original on offer here. Someone who is the most powerful, yet least experienced is a tautology and a tired trope in this case.

On top of that, there's a curse that only the special snowflake child can lift, despite everyone telling her it's unbreakable: "Buried deep within her family’s history of magic is a deadly curse that has plagued them for generations." That's a bit much and it sure isn't resolved in volume one!

The inexplicable thing here, about the story so far, is that despite no one - but no one - wanting Vivienne to know about her family history, and despite her having been been protected from the curse Harry Potter style by living away from the magical world with relatives - her adoptive mother inexplicably left a photo of Vivienne, as a child and in the arms of her birth mother, in a family photo album. That made zero sense to me, but it was this author's rather hamfisted way of bringing realization to Vivienne and launching her into her quest.

So Vivienne travels to New Orleans (at least it's not Salem - barf! - but it's still trope as hell) with her best friend, unimaginatively named Savannah. Savannah accompanied her for one cheap and clichéd reason only, which I shall get to at the end of this review. Vivienne quickly discovers that her birth mother has been kidnapped.

The idiot blurb writer gets frantic at this point and tosses the usual dumb-ass questions at the potential reader: "Can Vivienne become the witch she needs to be? Or will her newfound powers prove too much for her to handle?" We know they won't otherwise how is the author going to pad this out into a series?

Then the blurb writer lies, as usual: "She will soon learn that all magic comes at a price." No, it doesn't. It even tells us in the novel itself that spells cost something, but what it shows us is that just like in the Harry Potter stories, no matter what spell is cast, it costs nothing to the caster. The magic is tediously trope. There's nothing new or inventive. It's all about the four (non-)elements: air, earth, fire, and water. The protagonist, of course, is fire.

At one point I read how the Moon is tied to silver, the Sun to gold, but there was no explanation as to why. The protagonist complains that she's "still not really understanding his explanation." I'm not either! The Sun is arguably a gold color, but there's quite literally no metallic gold in the sun. That element - a real element - isn't created until a star explodes. Likewise I doubt there's much silver on the Moon, if any. Believe it or not, for an airless body, the Moon is 60% oxygen - all of which is bound to metallic and other elements in the Moon's interior. Pretty much all of the rest of it is silicon and aluminum with traces of calcium, iron, magnesium, and titanium. The color of the Moon is merely a reflection of the sun and it's not even a silver color! So whence this linking to those valuable metals? It's nonsensical.

Vivienne is launched on a crash course in practical magic which, unlike Harry Potter, she masters improbably quickly, and is magically lighting candles, throwing troubled guys into walls, and levitating, in no time. We learn that she, not Aubrey, a cousin, is now the high priestess of the coven - a coven here being six, not thirteen for reasons unexplained. The grand priestess though is Vivienne's grandmother who is consistently referred to as Grand’Mere. Now that word isn’t missing a letter so why the apostrophe?! I dunno! Another mystery!

The magic was a joke. In addition to the trope herbs and candles, and that crap, the spells were cast in Hallmark rhymes which made me laugh. It made no more sense than Harry Potter casting spells by waving a stick and chanting two Latin words. The obvious question is: what language did they use to cast spells before Latin came along? And if it worked, why switch to Latin? In the case of this story, how did they cast spells back in medieval times if they couldn't rhyme in modern English? LOL! It felt cheap and cheesy, and truly juvenile.

That wasn't the worst thing though. In this genre, the whole thing about magic is that it's supernatural - outside, or over and above nature yet the author says at one point, "you can’t override nature. If something is too far gone, you can’t bring it back. It goes against the rules of nature." But isn't that precisely what magic does?! How is levitating complying with the rules of nature? How is turning something invisible, complying with the rules of nature? How is moving an object with the mind complying with the rules of nature? This made zero sense. The author had not thought it through.

There were some writing issues where the author, in her haste, had unfortunately juxtaposed words amusingly, such as when I read, "A sudden tightness wracked my chest when I saw the photo of Mom and me sitting on her dresser." So while they had once sat on the dresser, someone photographed them doing it?! It's a minor quibble. We've all been down that authoring rabbit-hole. At another point there was a misuse of a word when I read, "I shoved Nanette’s magical satchel into my jeans pocket." What she meant was sachet, not satchel. You can't fit a satchel into your jeans pocket!

A bigger problem was when I read things like: "I hopped into my metallic blue Jeep," or "Sebastian's Altima screeched to a halt behind us." Apparently it's important to the author that we know he has an Altima, because she mentions it twice. Why? I don't know and I don't care, nor is it relevant that she has a metallic blue Jeep. I don't get that approach to writing that at all. If the make and color of the car are important for some reason, then yeah, but here? Not so much! It's overkill and comes off as obsessive.

At one point I read that someone's voice "crackled" - when the author quite evidently meant that it "cracked." That's auto-correct for you! But these were minor issues which were not a big deal when compared with the problems in the writing, such as when Vivienne displaces her cousin Aubrey as high priestess of the coven. Aubrey doesn't take this well, and her incessant snide remarks about Vivienne's powers - or lack thereof - were so frequent that they quickly became tedious to read.

There was a certain amount of manhandling of the females going on here, too. If they were close family, then this would have been understandable, but Vivienne and Savannah had literally just met these people, and barely knew them. There had been no time to bond, yet the guys are inappropriately familiar and it became a bit creepy to read.

You thought I'd forgot about Savannah, huh? No! Early in the story, Savannah loses her phone at Vivienne's bio-mom's house, and it's when they go back there to recover it that they discover she's been adbucted. At the end of the story - way too late for it to matter - they recover Savannah's phone and yet no one suspects for a minute it might have been cursed or had something else done to it. These people are morons. And again, way too late for it to matter, Savannah is dispatched home for her safety, regardless of the fact that nowhere is she safer than right there with the witch coven in the protected home right where she was.

At the end of the story, a little is made of the fact that Vivienne hasn't heard from Savannah - calling to confirm that she made the hour-long drive home safely. Vivienne idiotically dismisses it as Savannah's phone having lost its charge, despite the phone having been barely used. I have a theory that volume two, as is de rigeur for a series, is an exact copy of volume one, except that now it's Savannah who has been abducted rather than Vivienne's bio-mom. I have no way of knowing if this is true and I don't care to find out, but that's my guess.

So the cheap and clichéd reason that Savannah (who had very little to do in the story, and who could actually have been dispensed with entirely) accompanied Vivienne was to become the new maiden in distress for volume two. Barf! Two volumes and two instances of a female being the weak link - and from a female author? That's as shameful as it is pathetic. I can't commend this series.

By Wind by T Thorn Coyle

Rating: WARTY!

The biggest problem with this story is that the author has actually drunk the Flavor Aid, and she believes everything she writes: the magic, the aroma therapy, the healing power of crystals, and so on. That's all bullshit, and it wouldn't even be so bad if she didn't preach her religion instead of writing a novel.

Worse even than this is that the story is so tediously lethargic that it drags and drags, and drags and goes nowhere. I dropped this at 30% because literally nothing interesting had happened except for endless Cassandra-style wailing about, as John Fogerty put it, a bad moon arising. In short, up to when I quit, there was no story and what there was instead was awful.

I mean, for example, Brenda, the leader of the 'coven' has a closer-than-a-sister best friend whom she's known for years, yet not once has she confided in her over this bad feeling she's been having until she's pretty much forced into an 'intervention' of sorts! How close can they be when Brenda won't even call or drop her best friend a text? It's tell one thing, but show another all the way here.

The plot, such as it is, is that new age garbarge shop owner Brenda, 'has a bad feeling about this' but what 'this' is, she can't say. She supposed to be a witch, but none of her purported magic, nor that of her 'coven' is of any value whatsoever since no one can tell her anything useful. Plus, she's hearing voices. This woman is in dire need of lithium and psychotherapy.

The other metronomc voice in this tediously tick-tock story is of her purported lover-to-be, Caroline, who is, of course a magical crystal saleswoman. The problem is that at 30% these two had barely even said 'hello'. The blurb asked stupidly (as usual) "Who - or what - stalks Caroline?" Well that would be her control-freak husband who Caroline is apparently too stupid to ditch despite all the freedom she has. The blurb boasts, "Brenda and her coven must act swiftly, before the coming storm blows them all away." Given how ineffective those losers are, it ain't gonna happen. This story was truly bad and boring.

Hooky by Míriam Bonastre Tur

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a comic book for younger readers written and illustrated by talented Spanish artist Tur. It's rooted in a 'webcomic' from 'webtoon' with which I am not familiar, but which seems to have been a success.

This version evidently has new material, but without knowing the original I can't speak to that. While I thought the artwork was bright, colorful, and well done, for me the story failed to live up to the illustrations. It was choppy and made no sense, and while I realize that I am not the intended audience, and that a less critical audience might well go for this, I can only review it from my own perspective and for me it failed for a variety of reasons. I will say that one wonderful thing about it is that this story did not have JK Rowling's sexist distinction that boys were glorious wizards, but girls were 'only' witches with all the negative baggage that appellation entails. No, these guys were both witches!

I have a problem with magic stories where the actual magic takes a back seat and the story ends up being just a regular story with a patina of magic dusted over it for flair, and that's what seems to have happened here. There were so many places where magic would have been useful, but obviously if you're in a world where you can 'magic' anything, you really need to work on the story to make it entertaining. It's a fine line the author walks between going full throttle magical, which risks making everything too easy for the protagonists, and being a magical miser, which to me makes the magical elements worthless by failing to use them when they make logical sense.

The author seems to attempt to get around this by having these kids be so poorly-educated (magically speaking) that they swing right into that 'magical miser' territory and for me this spoils the story. It seems to me that the kids ought to have had at least a basic grounding in magic from their parents or from their elementary magic school, but none of this is even discussed, much less explored, so there's this huge plot hole whereby the kids are rank amateurs, but we're offered no reason why.

The story here is that witch twins Dani and Dorian miss the school bus that would deliver them to their magical academy. Instead of telling their parents of this, or taking out their brooms and flying, they give up completely and end up wandering aimlessly around, quite lost as to what to do. Through a series of accidental events they end up with an advanced professor of magic, and somehow irresponsibly fail to tell their parents of their change of plans.

The story deteriorates after this as they fall in with a random group of misfits - a princess and a trouble-maker - and just have a chaotic series of adventures seemingly unconnected to anything. Meanwhile we're getting hints of a magical conspiracy, but that seems like a separate and entirely unconnected story. I was pretty much lost by this time because I had no clear idea of what the author was trying to do, or where this story was going, if anywhere. It just seemed to meander at the author's fleeting whim without having a purpose or a plan, and I DNF'd it because it was not entertaining me at all. I was looking for a coherent story, and there wasn't one to be had here. It felt more like a disconnected series of Sunday newspaper cartoons, which is what, I'm guessing, the web series was. So while I loved the art, I can't commend it based on the story - or lack thereof.

Witch Rising by Amber Argyle

Rating: WARTY!

I should have known to avoid this novel as soon as I read the title, but I did not. More fool me! The book blurb describes this as a fast read, but what it actually means is that it's not a novel - it's a short story with a cliffhanger ending. It's essentially a prologue to a series which I shall not read and for good reason. For example: you'd think in a short work like this, the author would recall what she wrote, but apparently not. At one point toward the end, I read, "It had been eight years - eight years of forcing herself to forget - but she had remembered one song." Nope! The author apparently forgot that she'd had the witch sing up a wind to try and save her stepfather's life. Now a handful of screens later, she's trying to recall what the song was? It wasn't eight years it was a couple of days! That's bad writing, right there.

Lilette is your usual trope special snowflake who is a witch as her mother is, but mom and dad are killed. Lilette believes it was her fault. Put to sea in a barrel(!), she eventually ends up on an island where the chief is a jerk. Lilette is protected by a kindly man until he dies and she, now fully grown, is left at the mercy of Bian, the tribal chief who wants her for his own. She tries to escape but her escape is thwarted. End of story - or rather, end of prologue. Now you have to buy the series to find out what happens next, but guess what? Lilette was such a boring damp rag of a character that I honestly don't care what happens to her. And this is why I don't read prologues. They're a waste of time as was this.

The book blurb makes this claim of Lilette: That she's the "most powerful witch ever born" Lie! She's a wuss who (as is typical in this type of story) hardly ever uses her magic and least of all when she actually needs it, as is evidenced by her being unable to magic her way out of that barrel, by her using a knife instead of magic to free herself from her initial capture, by failing to use the magic to stop people overtaking her sailboat as she tries to escape, and by failing again to use it to stop them retaking her prisoner. In short, she's the worst witch ever and her magic is quite evidently useless.

Another claim: "when her secret is revealed, the only thing that can save her is her song." Lie. It never saves her - not in this short story. Another claim: "It's time to rise up and become what she was always meant to be." Lie! She never does. Not in this short story. There's also the claim that this short story "will keep you bewitched long after you finish it." Lie! I did not like it and will forget it quickly. This novel was garbage and as is so often the case, the blurb lied like a dog.

The Silver Witch by Paula Brackston

Rating: WARTY!

I love the Welsh accent and I enjoyed listening to the reader, Marisa Calin's understated voice in this audiobook, but no matter how sweet her voice was, and it was honeyed, it couldn't make up for a ponderous plot that seemed to be going nowhere even during those rare times when it was actually moving. I was quite engrossed in the story to begin with, but by the time I got halfway through and still nothing really interesting was happening, I couldn't stand the lethargy and inertia anymore, and I ditched the book in favor of something that actually interested me.

So, the story! Tilda Fordwells is an albino woman (why, we never get to learn - maybe just to make her stand out?) who is somehow tied to another albino witch and seer who lived in this same area of Wales in the tenth(?) century. The story is told in two pieces - third person present: Tilda Fordwells, and first person present, but in the past: Seren Arianaidd. To me this is annoying, although for the sake of enjoying this story I let it slide, but to me it seems wrong. I am not a fan of first person at all, but the Tilda story, if the author had to do this, should have been the first person present, and the Seren part should have been in third person past. It made no sense, ass-backwards as it was.

Tilda moves into a home she was going to share with her husband, but he died in a vehicle accident a year prior to the story beginning. Tilda starts having visions of an ancient people and a ghoulish presence. Meanwhile, there's an archaeological dig going on over on this island in the middle of the lake nearby where she lives, and a grave is uncovered with two bodies. It seems obvious who the bodies are: Seren's rival for the Prince's love, named Wenna (spelling uncertain - audiobook!) and her scheming brother, and Princess Wenna who is now out for revenge on Seren's modern ancestor, which was a bit unoriginal and pathetic, and the haunting part of the story made little sense.

The real problem though, was the Quaalude pacing of the story and the endless repetitive detail. We were treated to Tilda and Seren's every random thought and mundane action like it was some miraculous event worth witnessing and deliberating over repeatedly. No, it wasn't, and what was a minor irritation to begin with became a serious impediment to focusing on the story.

After listening to half of this novel, carried largely by Calin's voice and barely at all by the story, I reached a point where I simply didn't care what became of any of these people and ditched it. I could listen to Calin forever, but not if she's reading this stuff! I started re-watching Torchwood for my Welsh accent fix and the truth is I like Gwen Cooper far more than ever I could like Seren or Tilda!

Black Annis: Demon Hunter by Aubrey Law

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first in a series (Revenge of the Witch) and I'm not typically a series fan, but this short novel did have some interesting aspects, and I am a fan of going off the beaten track, so this appealed to me. That said, I have mixed feelings about whether I'll pursue it beyond this story, which is in effect (as are all first volumes) just a prologue. I'm not a fan of prologues either, and I typically skip them!

The story is a bit of a rip-off of an English legend so why it's set in the US is a mystery. Apparently no novel is worth reading unless it's US-based! I don't subscribe to that, but the premise for this one intrigued me. Rather than go out snatching babies from their homes and eating them as the legendary Black Annis does, this Black Annis is a demon-destroyer. She doesn't do this out of any sort of altruism however, but through a desire for vengeance on her tormentors and captors after having been kept in hell for four hundred years.

How she survived compos mentis during that time is rather skipped over, but Annis's survival trick in the carnal world is to take over a new body whenever she's done with the old one. She does this by finding someone who is evil and simply inhabiting their body, thereby putting an end to their evil reign. There's no clear word on what happens to the old bodies which Annis discards. How this behavior got her into hell is also rather danced around. After her break from hell though, and through a misunderstanding, she inhabits the wrong woman (that is, an innocent rather than a guilty one) and she manages to escape from a sex-slavery den with that woman's lover. Their new relationship isn't carnal; it's fraught with danger since demons do not stop hunting her.

This was one thing which made me hesitant about reading another volume. Do I really want to read another book about violent slaughtering of disgusting demons? One volume is usually more than enough of that sort of thing, and the problem with series is that by their very nature they're derivative, repetitive, unimaginative, and therefore boring, if not sickening. My jury is still out on whether or when "I'll be back!" Part of the problem with series and one which was exhibited here quite strongly, is that the first volume is all-too-often mistakenly used as the workhorse in building the world in which the series will take place.

I got the feeling that this was like the opening stage of a chess game, with key pieces being moved into place. The problem as that I was hoping for an actual game, and I never really got one. The story never got past the opening gambit. This is a problem. I wish more writers of series would actually give you a novel to read and enjoy, and they would worry about filling out their world in subsequent volume rather than try cramming their entire set-up into the first volume so all you get is world building instead of a satisfying story. This story was okay, but it wasn't as rewarding as it could have been had the author put more into it. It wasn't really a whole story, so that was a downer for me.

The writing in general was good. There was only one real writing issue I can recall, and it was where Annis and her friend were breaking into a vampire residence which had armed human guards, and one of the guards had instructed another guard to kill Annis and her friend. In the end, it was the guard who got shot, and I read, "Hey, aren't they gonna know you just killed that guard?" Well yeah! The guard had been instructed to shoot them , so the other guard was expecting to hear two shots, not one! Why they would think the shot would give anything away was a mystery. The question that was asked ought to have been "Hey, aren't they expecting two shots?" So, it could have been better thought-through, but it wasn't a disaster.

Be warned that the descriptions are quite graphic and the language isn't restrained at all. That's what gave the book authenticity for me, because it if had gone with a PG-13 take, it would have sucked, and sounded so hollow and pathetic. But there are only so many descriptions of vile demons, and only so many ways of killing them that I can stand to read before tedium sets in. This is why it was hard to see where this book would go from here and still manage to keep things fresh and entertaining - and interesting. There was nothing in this set-up which made me desperate to read on and find out what happened to character X or situation Y, although I did like the general tone of the story.

So overall, I consider this a worthy read, but I'm skeptical about future installments.

Witch Ways by Kristy Tate

Rating: WARTY!

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.

The Witches of the Wytewoods by MJ Thompson

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a British novel which is fine with me, but some stateside readers might find the wording rather peculiar at times. The story is of Erica Royal and her brother Clark who we meet in the middle of Wytewoods on the run. They're trying to reach a safe city where Erica's uncontrollable magic can be removed, but they're being pursued by minions of two evil witches who control the woods and want her magic.

This begs the immediate question as to why the kids (and why are they traveling alone?) are going through the woods instead of around them. The woods do not go on forever in all directions, but no answers are to be found on that score. Predictably and inevitably, Erica is captured by the witches and Clark is rescued by a girl named Rose who also happens to be a witch, and who agrees to help him track down and rescue Erica.

I have to say the story is rather depressing because it's an unrelenting downer of struggles and torments with nothing to leaven the load. I confess I found that irritating, as I did the fact that two witches are perverting the woods and allowing all manner of evil to grow there, yet no explanation is offered for why this is so. Why are they so outright evil as opposed to just being obsessed with capturing Erica's magic? There's no explanation for this either, and their evil and the perverse nature of the woods seems to serve no purpose - not for the story, other than to render it rather horrific, or more to the point, in terms of serving any purpose for the witches. It seemed like a waste of magic.

I also have to say that Clark is a moron. Despite having traveled in the woods and survived, he persistently underestimates it and fails to heed good advice given by expert Rose, repeatedly blundering into situations and undermining Rose's help and his own quest. He's also not too bright. At one point, a stone statue offers him good advice, which for once he follows and it saves his life. Later, when Rose talks of asking these statues, called oracles, for help, Clark's moronic retort is "How's a lump of stone going to help us find a witch?" Did he forget that one of these 'lumps' saved his life because it knew things?

Rose is a freaking saint just for putting up with Clark, let alone leading him to his sister, and he never truly appreciates her. That said, overall the story is pretty decent (remembering the caveats above) and I commend it as a worthy read.

The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass by Adan Jerreat-Poole

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Adan Jerreat-Poole is, I believe, Canadian which may account for some of her "English" spellings of words in this novel - words like 'sombre' and 'glamours'. This shows my ignorance because I'd always thought that Canadians used American spellings. However, it's always good to read outside of one's comfort zone, especially since far too many novels published in the USA seem to take the position that it's the only country in the world and nothing of interest happens anywhere else! I beg to differ!

I liked this novel because it was operating outside the box and far from the beaten path. Far too many novels play it safe - clone someone else's work and turn it into a trilogy. I blame publishers for pushing this boring approach and writers for kow-towing to it. I love the ones which don't comply!

The story here is that Eli (not sure how it's pronounced: E-lie? Ellie?) is less of a person than an object - an assassin 'robot' almost, constructed by witches out of organic bits and inorganic bobs. She can pass through the vortex between the witches' world and the human world, and her 'job' is to take out ghosts. And I don't mean date them!

These ghosts are not the incorporeal remains of a dead human. They're wispy beings which are almost zombie-like in some respects, and which typically occupy a human body. They can't be seen by humans, and the witch powers-that-be detest them. Eli's maker, a witch who is growing in power and influence, hands out her assignments proudly because Eli is the best assassin. She has seven special knives that help her do her work to perfection, and she has never failed. Until she does. That's when things change.

It takes a while for Eli, who constantly grows and evolves throughout this story, to figure out exactly why the ghosts are a problem for the witches, and all the time she is learning and seeing her world in very broader strokes. She discovers she's in a much different world from the one she'd thought she was in. In pursuing her last assassination - the one mission that's doomed to fail - Eli encounters two people: Tav, a non-binary person who is a biker, and Cam, a gay cab driver. These two become close to her - the first people in the human world she's ever been drawn to.

I've seen some reviews of this novel that praise it for including genderqueer characters, but in some ways it's rather overdone here. It's not a problem that they're included, but that they risk overwhelming the story to the exclusion of all others. At times it starts to feel like there are only gender-queer people in this world.

To me, the way to fix a problem where the pendulum has been pushed too far and for too long in one direction isn't to push it forcibly and equally back in the opposite direction, but to weld it firmly in the middle so no one is cruelly excluded or artificially included ever again. As it happens, in this story it wasn't too intrusive despite Eli being apparently non-cis as well. Perhaps I didn't mind so much because I really liked Eli as a character. She's definitely one of my strong-female character icons.

I enjoyed the story and read it quickly. I liked the originality. I enjoyed the different take on witches and ghosts and the magnificent world-building. This was a tour-de-force of inventive thinking outside the box and it was a most welcome read. There were some technical issues no doubt caused by Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process. I'm not the kind of reviewer who gets to read a hardback print version, so I got the e-version and there was the trademark Kindle mangling in evidence here.

One classic example of this is the embedding of the page header (alternating title and author on even and odd pages) right into the text, so I would read, for example: "She clenched her hands. THE GIRL OF HAWTHORN AND GLASS Took a breath in." The way I avoid this in my own published work is never to include page headers or footers (including page numbers) in the version I'm using for ebooks. I don't even use the headers in the print book version. What, is your reader going to forget what they're reading? I have a little more faith in readers than that.

The book also contained some abstract images that were included between chapters and sometimes as section separators in the text. These images were apparently broken-up and turned into Kindling by Amazon as well, although without having seen the original images, it's hard to tell. In other instances of generic Kindle mangling, the text was missing a line break between speech from different characters, so I'd read it all on one line:
"Hey, it usually works like a charm." "I'll bet." Eli rolled her eyes."

And one final observation: I'm sure that even in Canada, there's a difference between staunch and stanch. I read, "Tav staunched the bleeding" but unless Tav was making Cam bleed in a loyal and committed manner, she didn't staunch it. She stanched it. I've seen this error increasingly in YA novels and I find it sad. The error was repeated later as "one hand staunching the flow of blood." Nope! Stanching! There was one lone error in spelling that I noticed: "you will owe use a thousand glamours," which I think should have read 'us' rather than 'use'. Presumably that sort of thing will be corrected before this is published officially.

But we've all been there and I'm not going to downgrade such a stellar book for some minor issues. I thoroughly enjoyed this and I commend it as a worthy read. I look forward to the next offering from this author.

The Witches of Willow Cove by Josh Roberts

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.

Don't Mess With This Witch by Liz Lorow

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
“...not a plant like a Fichus or Gardenia.” A fichu is a square of lace used to preserve modesty on low-cut gowns in the 18th and 19th century. I believe the author meant ficus.

“I had no control over a porcupine wandering into my neighborhood in rural England. They live there." No, they don’t! Britain has no porcupines! There are porcupines around the Mediterranean, but southern Europe is as far north as they get. Britain has hedgehogs which are unrelated to porcupines and much more cute. I had a couple as pets growing up there.

“...he flexed his bicep.” Doubtful! Biceps, yes, bicep? Not so much! I don't see how you can have a character who almost chides someone for not using 'whom' and then doesn't know that the bicep is only one part of the biceps which is the muscle that gets flexed! In another part of the novel I read, "Recommended? By whom?" Seriously, no one but the most pretentious people use that in speech, and you certainly don't hear it from a 16-year old in juvie.

“You’re itching is driving you crazy” - confusion of 'your' and 'you’re'.

Reading this book was like a roller-coaster in terms of my wanting to rate it a worthy read, and not. I kept changing my mind and I had multiple issues with it. In the end that;s what decided it. I read the thing the whole way through - except for the epilogue (I don't do epilogues or prologues) and I didn't hate it and in general the writing wasn't awful either, and I enjoyed some of the characters, but in the end, there were so many issues that I can't in good conscience rate it positively.

I like stories where a team gets together to achieve an end. I just published one myself, so I was a bit disappointed that what seemed to be a team forming here ended-up not becoming one. On the other hand I liked the main character - for the most part. She was smart and amusing and strong, which is a big plus for me, but countering that were the parts of the book where she was effectively infantilized by the trope YA guy named, of all things, Logan. I could have done without him. So that's the way this story hit me all along - one time I was up for it, the next I was having grave misgivings about it.

At one point Logan, the main character's love interest, says, “I was raised to respect and protect women." This turned me off the story because it became yet another YA story where the girl is the maiden in distress and the big tough guy is the white knight coming to save and protect her! Genevieve, the main character, needed no one's protection. I can see a guy saying that - guys do say those kinds of things, but the fact that there was no push-back from Genevieve was what was wrong. We need to get past this idea that women are universally weak and helpless and in every case, need a strong man to take care of them. It's that kind of thinking that leads to abuses: putting women on a pedestal on the one hand and slapping them with the other.

In another instance, I read, "Logan leapt to his feet and extended his hand to help me up." Again this suggests Genevieve is the weak one who needs the help. I know some people might view this as merely being gentlemanly, but unless you have a later scene where Genevieve extends a hand to help Logan up, this bias against women being capable of taking care of themselves is really an abuse. If Logan respects women, why does he constantly treat them like they're always in need of help? It felt sexist, especially in this case, given how powerful Genevieve truly is. In another instance, Logan said, "I don't want you going anywhere without me...Someone needs to be with you to protect you." Again with the infantilization. it was almost as nauseating as how many times characters rolled their eyes in this book or the incessant number of times Genevieve opened or closed her eyes. It was like she was doing that constantly!

Her power was also an issue in that she felt rather like a 'special snowflake' - like she never had to work for a thing; everything she tried to do was a great success, powers came to her just when she needed them, and she always had the right spell for the job despite her evidently substandard education on the topic. It was a bit too much. She never had to struggle for anything.

I liked the idea of witches in juvie. That's what drew me to the story in the first place. It was different, original, and interesting. The students were captive, but they were expected to follow an academic schedule - and they had a surprising amount of freedom, but their magical powers were somehow suppressed so they could not use them - and yes, these witches seemed more like magicians than witches. Not that the book description helped, since it wasn't at all honest in describing what happened: "Now the administration needs Genevieve’s help to find a student/inmate who escaped." No, they don't! They never asked her to do that. She did it all by herself!

That didn't detract from the story for me, but it does reinforce my own tack in avoiding Big Publishing™ because the people who write the back cover blurbs seem never to have actually read the story they're describing, and worse, the people who illustrate the front cover seem never to have read it either. I know those who do not self-publish have little say in their covers or book blurbs, which is why I pay zero attention to the front cover when deciding which books I want to read. They're highly misleading, and I laugh at authors who have dramatic cover reveals because they're so pathetic and juvenile. In this case, the cover showed a young woman with straight black hair, yet the antagonist in this novel has wavy brown hair. I honestly don't see how you can confuse the two. I guess it wasn't edgy enough for the cover photographer, huh? They'd rather misrepresent it.

But enough about the cover. I read a book for the content, not for the pretty picture on the front. One of the first issues I had with this, other than the silly trope of having spells cast in rhyme, was the fact that this juvenile witch detention center had an off-limits library! What? Why? Why would they put dangerous books in a detention center that could potentially enable these witches to escape? It made zero sense. A regular library? Yes! An off-limits one? No!

Though this wasn't a high-school, another issue (other than purloining 'muggles' from JK Rowling and changing one letter to make it somehow 'different') was the trope high-school bully, in the form of a teacher who routinely brutalized the children by subtly undermining their education, and using their failures to add months onto their sentences. I know there needs to be a villain in these stories, but this felt like lazy writing, with a teacher having that much power and evidently no review or oversight. It just felt like too much.

One of the issues I have with magical novels is that the authors tend not to think things through and truly envision what a world with magical powers would be like - even one where magic is kept hidden from the public). With few exceptions, they tend to have the world be exactly the way it is today, just with the addition of the magicians, or witches, or whatever, and it really doesn't work very well.

For example, in this story, there was a section where Genevieve says, “At least I didn’t live in Centralia, Pennsylvania. That town is deserted because of a coal fire that’s been burning underground since nineteen sixty-two." This is true. In fact recently, there was an article on CNN's website that talked about a stretch of abandoned highway there which has been literally covered in graffiti and has become a tourist attraction, but the authorities are covering it up because it's not safe for tourism.

So far so good, but this novel isn't our world: this is a world where there are witches with powerful magic, and yet none of the witches have been out there to try and stop the burning? If you're going to reference real-world events, then then it seems to me to necessitate a witch's perspective to go along with it. Why haven't the witches stopped the burning? Do they not care? Can they not do it? To suggest there are immensely powerful witches and yet this fire still burns, like the witches frankly don't give a damn, leaves a hole in the story for me. I think you really need to address why witches didn't make a difference. Or not mention the situation at all.

There was an instance where Genevieve is trying to hide behind a pole and I read, "I had to become invisible - something I’d never tried before, or skinnier - something every witch has tried with varying success.” This felt like body-shaming - that witches are universally overweight, or think they are. This felt like something that could have passed unmentioned, or if you have to mention it, then maybe say some witches have tried it. To call out every witch and suggest they're overweight or have a poor self-image felt like an awful thing for a female author to do to her fellow females.

So while this writer can write and tell a decent story in general terms, for me there were far too many loose ends and examples of thoughtless writing for me to rate this as a worthy read. I wish the author all the best in her career, because based on this one, I think she has some good stories to tell, but this particular one was too hobbled with issues to fly and sad as it makes me, I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Witch Hunt by Shirley Damsgaard

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

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is one of several l've seen come out recently picking over the bleached bones of The Wizard of Oz. Rather than re-write that story, this one comes in as a prequel, detailing The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. It's also not aimed at children by any means: it's very much an adult novel. The witch is named Elfaba from LFB (Lyman Frank Baum) and is born, after her mother was raped, with green skin and is much despised. Way to make a pregnant woman who was raped feel like her child might be worth keeping, Maguire. She meets Glinda when they both go off to college and Glinda is presented much more as an evil witch there than is Elfaba.

But I tired of this quickly. The writing did not interest me and I gave up on it before getting very far. Life is far too short to stick with a novel that doesn't grab you from the off, so I let go and moved on. I can't commend this based on what I read of it. It was slow and uninteresting and offered nothing to engross me.

Witchnapped in Westerham by Dionne Lister

Rating: WARTY!

This was your standard loss-leading opening volume in what the author hopes will become a successful series, and I wish her best of luck with that, but I wasn't impressed enough to want to continue - not even with this first volume, which I DNF'd. To be fair, I rarely do find a series like that - one I feel I can really get into.

Plus, some oddities. At one point I read, "We passed through the centre of town; shingles, dark brick, and chimneys abounded." Except that there are no 'shingles' in Britain unless you're talking about the skin inflammation. Or a pebbly beach. There are roof tiles. That said, it's been a while since I lived there, so maybe that's changed. Americanisms are creeping in everywhere. It just struck me as a sore thumb rather than a shingle though, but not in itself a book killer. It is a reminder in general for writers to be sure we're getting it right if we're writing about a country we may not have visited.

I've been experimenting with this novel! It's possible to have ebooks read to you as audiobooks, but the technology for this isn't exactly top of the line, much less cutting edge. Why businesses like Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Apple don't try to get ahead of Kindle by introducing this technology as a free feature I do not know. Apple has pretty much given up on books, and B&N has pretty much given up on customers, but while I haven't yet given up on B&N like I did on Amazon, I am very disappointed in them. Kobo hasn't done anything to piss me off...yet!

But I digress. There are two methods I've found to bypass the stupidity and lethargy of the ebook vendors though, and have your phone read a book to you. One is to use an app like Air Read, which is free, but has a very robotic voice. It's quite amusing actually, and entertains with mispronunciations even when the book fails to entertain. It's a bit plodding, but it works decently well and I like it. The problem is that Air Read doesn't work inside apps like iBooks, Kobo, or Nook; it will read to you only those books which you load into the app, and as anyone knows who has tried to download a book they supposedly own from B&N for example, you cannot do it! The truth is that you do not own that book. In reality, Barnes and Noble does and there is no way in hell they will let you have it so you can use Air Read or apps like that, to read it to you. To read those proprietary books in those proprietary apps, you will need an app like Apple's Voice Over (or VoiceOver), or whatever Android's equivalent of it is.

The problem with Voice Over is that reads quite literally everything on the screen, including all your icons and buttons, so you do not want to launch it unless you're already inside the book you want it to read. Then all you do is ask Siri to turn on Voice Over, and swipe two fingers from the top of the screen to the bottom in the ebook, and it will read it to you. In Apple's iBook, which has a continuous scroll setting, this was sufficient to have the book read to me as long as I wanted. The Voice Over did not stop. In Nook, the Voiceover stopped unpredictably. At first I was thinking this was only at a chapter end, and perhaps a blank part of the screen at the end of a chapter was sufficient to halt it, but then it began halting randomly - and just as randomly, on occasion, resuming reading for no apparent reason. It works better in Kobo's app, but stills tops at the end of a chapter if there is a space between that and the succeeding chapter.

This random halting was doubly-annoying because on the road I was driving, I was haltered by four red lights in succession, Obviously the city is utterly clueless about synchronizing lights and thereby saving gasoline. But during this time, the Voice Over worked flawlessly. After I started getting green lights, that's when it began misbehaving so I had no chance to take a few seconds to fix it while stopped at the light! LOL! Thus my trip to the iBooks site to get the same novel - for free fortunately, from there, to test it out in their app. It worked flawlessly. But be warned, Voice Over comes at a price to your sanity. Do not ever turn off your phone - I mean completely off, with Voice Over turned on, otherwise you will have a nightmare getting back in.

On my iPhone, you can't reboot the phone and fingerprint in; it won't work. You have to tap in a six-digit code. When Voice Over is on, it won't accept the code, it will just read it back to you as you hit each key! LOL! To bypass this, you have to quickly double-tap, wait a split second, then tap a third time to actually enter the code - this for each of the six digits! Way to go Apple. To be fair, this isn't designed for me or for reading ebooks - it's presumably designed for vision-impaired people so there are doubtless reasons it works the way it does, but for me, for my purposes, it was intensely frustrating until I found my way around its foibles.

Also to stop the app, you need to tap once on your ebook, and let Voice Over read that one line, then quickly request Siri to turn off Voice Over. I say quickly because if you're sluggish, then Voice Over will start reading what you asked Siri to do (which appears on your screen). This is beyond stupid in my opinion, because Siri will start listening to Voice Over and trying to do what it wants. It's a nightmare, and Apple doesn't really care anymore, not since Steve Jobs died.

But I digress. On the face of it this novel sounded interesting - an Aussie witch who doesn't know she's a witch because her powers don't kick in - for some unexplained reason - until she turns 24. On her birthday she discovers that her beloved brother, who lives in England with his British wife, has gone missing, and also that she's a witch, as is her brother and her brother's wife. This is conveyed to her by a complete stranger who shows up at her door unannounced. This was my first problem with this novel - the main character's gullibility. Obviously in this case what the visitor, Angelica, was telling her was the truth, but in reality no one in their right mind would immediately swallow a complete stranger's story like that without making some effort to verify it! Rather than do this, Lily drops everything, and takes a flight to London from Sidney with this stranger!

There are some people, and I think it was astronomer Carl Sagan who started this meme, who believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Regardless of whoever originated that, once Sagan said it, everyone started chanting it like parrots, but I think that assertion is bullshit. Extraordinary claims require the same evidence as any other claim - sufficient to show that there's a valid basis to the claim; no more, no less! But Lily evidently subscribes to the school which demands zero evidence for extraordinary claims. This made it particularly ridiculous later when at the airport. Let me explain.

Lily is a wedding photographer with dreams of becoming something more, and at a wedding the night before, she had seen something very peculiar through her camera lens. The bride's father had turned transparent, but only when looked at through the lens of the camera. Later she learned that the bride's father had died that next morning. She saw this same transparency thing with a random guy at the airport, and realized that perhaps she could see impending death, yet rather than ask Angelica who was supposed to be something of a tutor to Lily as her witch powers came in, Lily chose to keep this to herself! This despite trusting this same woman to the point of leaving her life in Australia and flying to Britain on no more than Angelica's say-so! I found that to be an extraordinarily hypocritical situation!

The next extraordinary thing was that James had been missing for a week, yet this sister, Millicent, whom Lily was supposed to really like, had failed to even so much as call Lily to let her know her bother had disappeared? How lacking in credibility is that? Note that Lily and James's parents (and no, Lily and James's last name isn't Potter) had disappeared many years before, so they aren't in the picture, and of course Lily and James are the last of their family line.

Too often for me, Lily's behavior was dumb. Sometimes the writing itself was dumb. In England, Lily finally met this group of witches with whom her brother used to work before he disappeared, but Lily finds them an unprepossessing lot. The only one she likes is Millicent. This initially made me think maybe Millicent had something to do with James's disappearance. What happened next though was that one of the unprepossessing witches took Lily to one side and made a deal with her - she would tell her something relevant if Lily agreed to undergo a magical bond with this witch never to tell the secret on pain of a choking death! Gullible Lily agrees almost at once.

The big secret was simply that Millicent and James had had an argument before he disappeared. I'm like, what the hell? Why would that be a huge secret? Why would this witch want Lily bonded so powerfully never to reveal it? So now I'm suspicious of that witch instead of Millicent. But that kind of absurdist melodramatic writing really turned me off, which is why I decided I would listen to this book only for the ride home after work that day before I ditched it, unless of course it really turned itself around. Given that I was then about halfway through it, I had zero faith that it would, but at least in this way I would get the chance to start on a brand new ebook coming in to work on Monday morning!

Well, it didn't, so...ditched! I can't commend this crap based on the dumb-ass portion of it that I listened to.

Courtney Crumrin Volume 4 Monstrous Holiday by Ted Naifeh

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume four wasn't quite as entertaining as the earlier volumes I think in part because Courtney seemed much more gullible in this one than she had in all of the three earlier volumes, which made little sense. Admittedly she was charmed by a boy, but having gone through what she'd been through previously, you'd think she'd be less inclined to fall for something instead of more so. And yes, she was feeling disgruntled (her gruntle had never been so dissed in fact), but it made her look limp and weak in comparison to how she'd appeared in earlier volumes. Ideally this would have been the first volume. That would certainly have made more sense in terms of her personal growth and would have explained a lot about her attitude in the other volumes.

That said it still made for an enjoyable read and I commend it as worthy. This story involves Courtney's visit, with her great uncle who is sometimes not so great it has to be remarked, to a family chateaux which of course is occupied by vampires, one of whom is mature and very old (although she looks in her thirties), and the other of whom is around Courtney's age, but also very old. So Yuk! The mature one is an old flame of Aloysius's evidently, and plays very little part in the story. It's the young one who charms Courtney and wins her confidence, and at first she wonders if he's a ghost, but when she realizes he's solid, she changes her view. Even when she suspects he's a vampire though, she trusts him and that trust is misplaced.

He bites her three times over the next few days, which is supposed to either be fatal or seal her fate as a vampire, but this is where the story let me down because the ending was a complete fizzle! I couldn't say if the vampires were destroyed because the panels where Great Uncle Aloysius did battle with them were not exactly categorical, and would a blood transfusion save Courtney at that stage? I dunno, but the book ended without giving any sort of an answer. It begs the question as to why her uncle even took her there is there were vampires and if he still insisted, why he didn't provide her with some magical protection against them.

So while the story was entertaining and I commend it, I have to say the ending was poorly done and a sad way to end such a sterling series.

Courtney Crumrin Volume 2 The Coven of Mystics by Ted Naifeh

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume two - meaning I finally caught up to the first volume I read in this series, which was three. I'm not a huge fan of series, not regular books, and not graphic novels, but this is one of those rare exceptions that manages to change up the story and keep it fresh and interesting even though we're following the same main character.

In this volume, Courtney learns new ways to circumvent and side-step the witch conventions that seem to hold everyone else in paralysis or in rigid regimentation. She's always ready to try something new, learn something extra, or make unexpected and unusual friends, and she has great instincts. She's not afraid to change her mind either, so this makes for a multi-faceted and engaging character.

So she starts out tackling Tommy Rawhead, the hobgoblin of the marl-pit, whom someone has unleashed. Fortunately, her enigmatic and mysterious uncle is just the match for Tommy, but just because Tommy's beheaded doesn't mean he can't be useful to Courtney later! Courtney gets an usual invitation to visit the cat council, but this involves her becoming a cat herself. Finally she befriends Skarrow of the under-world, and this brings trouble on her uncle's house.

The variety and inventiveness of these stories is remarkable and welcome and is what kept me reading on - that and the indefatigable Courtney. This is why I commend this volume and intend to go on to read volume four.

Courtney Crumrin Volume 1 The Night Things by Ted Naifeh

Rating: WORTHY!

As promised a few days back, I did pick up volume one and read it and loved it. I think I liked this more than the volume 3 I read previously, so now volume 2 is on the way!

This volume brings Courtney to her great uncle Aloysius's house...or is it her father's great uncle? Or his father's great uncle? Courtney gets bullied by the spoiled rich kids at school, but when she discovers her uncle has some interesting spell and charm books in his secret collection, she manages to co-opt help from a forest sprite, get herself glamoured to become the most popular person in school (big mistake), and lose the baby she was babysitting in a unilateral exchange with the fairies. But she cdecides she likes it here and wants to stay.

I enjoyed this book - the steady pace, the interesting situations, the steadfast fearlessness of Courtney and the endearing artwork. I commend it as a worthy read.

Courtney Crumrin Volume 3 In the Twilight Kingdom by Ted Naifeh

Rating: WORTHY!

I didn't realize when I first picked this one up on spec from the library that it's volume three in an apparently disjointed series of seven. It was readable as a standalone though, if you don't mind missing the backstory - which really doesn't seem to have impacted my grasp of this volume. By the time I'd completed half of it and found it engaging, I decided I might go back and see if the library has any previous volumes, and I still feel that way despite the story slowing down rather in the second half and not really having an ending.

Courtney is a young witch with a less than accommodating attitude, and I liked her as a character. She's powerful and feared, but for all that she seems to be very restrained with her practicing her witchery. She tries to warn her teacher at this witch school not to conduct this experimental spell, but the teacher doesn't listen, and when they realize the spell won't wear-off this poor kid, as the teacher had thought it would, Courtney has to step-up and try to fix it. The teacher has to learn a second lesson though, before she realizes she ought to seriously listen to Courtney's advice.

My problem in the second half was that Cortney went into the goblin lands to try to fix this bad spell, yet there was nothing she did there which seemed to lead to a solution, and nearly all her time there was spent fixing a second gaff by her teacher. One wonders why Courtney isn't teaching this class.

The thing is that by the end of the story, the boy still wasn't 'fixed'. I didn't understand that, and it doesn't appear that this story is taken up on any later volume, so I have to declare a certain amount of dissatisfaction with that regardless of how much I had enjoyed this to begin with. It's with some mixed feelings that I still consider this particular volume a worthy read therefore. It was interesting and different, and the black and white line art was good, but I guess I'll have to read another one to decide how I feel about the series as a whole.

The Okay Witch by Emma Steinkellner

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This middle grade graphic novel is about a witch of color, with the curious and charming name of Moth Hush, of Founder's Bluff, Massachusetts, who is about to discover that her love of witchery isn't just a fad of hers! Eighth-grade bullies are what triggers her powers coming to the fore, and there's no looking back.

Yes, it's a bit trope-y that this takes place in Massachusetts. I'm a little tired of that, but I decided to let that slide since this novel had more going for it than your usual tedious trope 'Salem witches' rip-offs, which personally I find offensive on behalf of the innocent women who died because of blind religious hatred.

It turns out that Moth's home town has a history of witch-related activity, including a family of witch-hunters. Plus there is, as the blurb advises, a talking cat which some readers may find familiar (that was a joke - a little chortle in the cauldron!). There is also an enchanted diary, and a hidden realm - because you have to call these things a realm, right? Anything less simply will not do. But there is also conflict, a sort of tug-of-war between old and new, and Moth isn't the sort of person to back down and give up.

I liked the story and the art, although the character's noses seemed a bit weird, but I didn't worry about that. I enjoyed the story and the main character (I'm a complete softy for a strong female lead), and I commend it as a worthy read.

Well Witched by Frances Hardinge

Rating: WARTY!

I became a fan of this author after reading the excellent A Face Like Glass, and I've had this volume on my shelf for some time, but only just got to it. My reading list is long and oft interrupted - what can I say? I'm sorry therefore to have to report that I quit reading Well Witched because it was moving so slowly and not in interesting directions. It was nowhere near interesting enough to justify some four hundred pages of this stuff and after DNF-ing it, I now consider it well ditched.

The story is about three middle-graders who, stuck for bus fare one night, raid a wishing well. The wishing well is of course cursed, and they discover uncomfortable changes in their lives and eventually come to the realization that since they took the money, it's now incumbent upon them to grant the wishes. This is on the face of it absurd, even within its own framework, because it wasn't like these wishes were made just the minute before these kids took the money! Obviously the wishes had been made over many weeks or even years, so why do they suddenly need to grant wishes? Who's to say these people even want those wishes anymore, and if they do, then why hasn't the spirit of the well or whatever, granted them? If she, he, or it couldn't or wouldn't, then why do these kids have to?

I was willing to overlook that to begin with, but when I saw how ponderously the story was moving, I lost patience with it. I don't see any reason to make a middle grade novel four hundred pages long. That strikes me as evidence of a chronic inability on the writer's part to self-edit! Just sayin'! I can't commend this based on the quarter of it that I read.