Rating: WARTY!
This book didn’t start out on its best foot with me, and it was mostly downhill from there! Be warned: if you're expecting anything like "The Witches of East End" or that kind of a witchcraft story, then you'll be as disappointed as I was. This one really isn’t a novel about witches or witchcraft; it’s about several women going through mid-life crises. Why the witchcraft was included was the real mystery for me, because it really plays very little part in the story - at least in as much of it as I managed to get through.
Told in third person which I like, it's third person present voice, which felt weird to me. The story is happening as it’s being told, so it was like sitting with a friend in a park or a mall somewhere, and the friend covering your eyes and then relating everything that happens. That's what it felt like. Why not just take your hands from my eyes so I can see it myself? But on the other hand, why would I want to see if it’s only something ordinary and boring? That's where a writer comes in - showing you the ordinary, but making it seem miraculous. I think this author failed in this case, which is ironic given that this is a book supposedly about magic. It was like the author's spell backfired and instead of the mundane becoming magical, the potentially magical was neutered and became fifty shades of mundane.
It was like the difference between being told and being shown, and this fell heavily onto the 'being told' side of that rickety fence, which is even more weird when you think of it in this context. I favorably reviewed this author's Dress Shop of Dreams back in January of 2015, but this one failed to grab me the way that one had, even though it was very similar in some ways. The present tense third-person voice was back. The fascination with math was back. The magic wasn't.
The novel features exactly what the title says (in a way!): witches who live in Cambridge (England), and I think that may have been a part of the problem - too many main characters and too little time spent getting to know them in a coherent block of text. Instead, we jumped abruptly and repeatedly from one to another, usually in the same chapter, so I had a really hard time separating one character from another. Initially, they all conflated since they really all seemed to be the same person with the same life and the same basic problem. Most of them are female, and it was depressing to read of the same (or monotonously similar) problems occurring with one witch after another.
There seemed to be no explanation as to why magical people had these problems, but perhaps that was because these so-called 'witches' were curiously hobbled in what they could do, too. They don’t have pointy hats or magic wands - for which I was grateful - but neither do they seem to be able to perform spells. They seemed far more like characters from the Heroes Reborn TV show, who have quirky powers which they can use, but which are quite restricted in many ways. Normally I like quirky; here it was uninspired.
Let me get one issue out of the way which has nothing to do with this author or this publisher. There were some formatting problems in the Kindle app version on my Android smart phone. I've seen these kinds of issues in other ebooks. At one point in this novel for example, there was a mathematical formula reproduced on the screen, but it precedes the sentence which introduces it: "Her favorite, the fundamental theorem of calculus, is framed in silver and glass above her desk:" The formula was supposed to appear (I assume!) after the colon, but it appeared before that entire sentence. I'm fairly confident that this wasn't how it appeared in the author's original. I’d be annoyed were I the author and Amazon screwed-up what I’d written and formatted, because it has a crappy ebook app.
The worst part was how slow the story seemed. It took forever to get anywhere, and I was, frankly, getting bored with the unremarkable minutiae of these people's lives and particularly irked by their self-pity and their constant, obsessive fretting over relationships, like they had no other interests in life, and nothing to offer in and of themselves. It was like they were only of any value when in the context of some partner, a partner with whom they seemed incapable of discussing problems which begs the question as to how their relationship could have been so idyllic in the first place. I know there are real life people who are as tame as these fictional people are, but I don’t like characters like that in novels, not unless they're going somewhere different, and soon, and none of these people appeared to have any direction, or any future. I especially dislike female characters like that, and it makes me wonder why so many female authors create them. I usually find them in YA novels, so it was especially sad to find them in a book which is ostensibly written for grown-ups.
Everything was tied to them having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, and without that they were evidently considered (or considered themselves) to be failures or hopeless cases. This was exacerbated by the emphasis on physical beauty - again by a female author who seems to buy into the nonsensical idea that if you're a female and you're not beautiful, you're not worth writing about. In addition to the tired 'flecks of gold in the eyes' YA trope (except here it was "vivid green with flecks of yellow", so maybe she deserves credit for that?! LOL!) there was one assertion after another that only beautiful women need apply: "...it’s not as if Kat isn’t a beautiful woman. It’s not as if she isn’t still propositioned by men, even, sometimes, by her own students." Here's another: "She was young and beautiful, with long legs and long dark hair and every boy in the math department wanted to date her."
Now this woman is supposed to be brilliant. We're told she's published scores of papers on mathematics, yet the focus isn’t on what kind of person she is, what contributions she's made, or how decent (or obnoxious, even) a human being she may be, but purely on how pretty her skin is. I can’t get interested in a story which is as shallow as that and which features characters as shallow as that. If this were some cheap erotic novel, which I don't read, then I could see physical attributes being dominant and prevalent, but this story is evidently trying to strut its stuff as literature, masquerading as a novel about female relationships. The problem is that instead of getting that - the inside track on how these people feel and what motivations they have - we’re being fed clichéd superficiality worthy of Harlequin romance fan fiction about how endlessly beautiful these women are!
I can’t take a story like this one seriously and it sure shouldn’t take itself seriously. Most especially it should not endow its female characters with absurdly pretentious names like Amandine, Cosima, Héloïse, and Noa and focus on their purported beauty to the exclusion of all else. I don't have a problem with a character thinking themselves beautiful (even if they aren’t!), or with a person perceiving their loved one(s) as beautiful. It’s fine to have a beautiful character if you're writing about a model, or an actor, where beauty is considered important by many, and which definitely opens doors. I’d prefer it if some quality other than skin was the focus, but I could see how you would be in the position of having to deal with beauty in those circumstances, but when the writer is promoting beauty as paramount in ordinary everyday people (their witchcraft notwithstanding), and talking as though it’s all a woman could possibly bring to the table, then I take issue with it because it devalues and objectifies women. The blurb for this book claims that it's about "the magic of life-changing love," but that's nonsense. There is no love on exhibit here. It’s all shallow, needy lust.
Then there's the weird pacing. Cosima is desperate for a father for her planned child(ren). She starts to consider George, (who isn’t beautiful!). We encounter the two interacting as George visits Cosima's Italian eatery, but he runs out, then there's a brief uninventive interlude with Héloïse running barefoot in the park (which apparently magically changes her life!), and suddenly we're back to George coming into the eatery. Did a day pass? Is this a flashback or a time-warp redux? Did he change his mind and come back an hour or two later? From the writing, it’s apparently at a later time, but the text isn't exactly helpful, and there are no chapter splits to break this up, only a blank line in the text. This made for a confusing read with me having to occasionally skim back a few screens to re-establish context. I admit that part of the problem was my fading ability to pay attention to the increasingly dull story, but better chaptering (if that's a word) would have made it considerably more readable.
When I got to 34% in, at the start of chapter eight, the first thing I read was “You are so beautiful, so, so beautiful,” and I just could not stand to read any more. I really couldn’t. This was an artist who was saying this, so you could argue that in one sense, his eye would be drawn to beauty and he would want to capture it, but for me it was still too shallow, especially in the simplistic way it was expressed. If this guy had had better words with which to frame his subject, I might have been able to read on a little longer at least, but this juvenile view of his made it sound like something a guy who wants to get laid would say to a naïve girl just to try and get her into bed, and it sounded truly pathetic. It didn’t sound anything at all like something a seasoned artist would say to his subject.
I’d already been increasingly turned off by it up to that point, but that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I no longer cared if Cosima accidentally caught George (the secret keeper) with a love potion or whether sister Kat, the master caster, could help this idiotic woman fix it. I honestly didn’t care if Amandine, the supposed empath was far too lacking in empathy to tell if her husband was really having an affair, or if psychic Héloïse ever got over her psychotic addiction to her dead husband or if Noa got rid of her obsessive-compulsive secret-spilling. I really didn’t. I can’t recommend this based on what I read.
