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.
