Alessandra Thomas

I couldn't read it I just had to give up. The heroine has an accident and has serious injuries and as a result of lack of mobility and change to lifestyle puts on quite a bit of weight. I think this is a really sensitive subject and the author would have been better not mentioning specific sizes. What is small/big/tall/short to each person to me is all about perspective. Once you say she is a size 12 people form an opinion, the women that are larger and smaller than that size can perceive her thoughts actions based on their own size or their friends/peers sizes.
She has low esteem about her body image but she goes on and on and on about it.… (meer)

This isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read but it was pretty mediocre. I may read the second and possibly subsequent books at some point... but I won’t be in a big hurry to do so. And I’m not even sure why, to be honest. Maybe it’s because I like books with witches?

I have no scientific evidence for this but anecdotally I think a fiction book—maybe especially a YA fiction book—with two authors is not a great sign of quality. As I started the book some things were just kind of eye-roll worthy: Of course she knew the guy from the police force for years and of course she had a crush on him and of course they were going to have to do this together—but could they trust each other? And of course they were going to fall madly in love with one another, seemingly all too soon.

But the biggest problem with this book, and what almost just made me put it down (and to be honest I’m not sure why I didn’t put it down at this point), was when they introduced Salem as part of the history of the Valerian community in general, and the Whelan family history in particular. That they discussed how the witches at Salem were burned at the stake! What?! I don’t consider myself to be an expert on Salem history, although it has been probably the topic that has the most fascinated me since middle school. I have numerous books on it, and will watch just about anything produced or listen to any podcast on the subject. But it takes literally almost no effort to find that there were no witches burned in Salem—Salem’s victims were executed by hanging. So it’s unbelievable to me that in a book where it’s well established that magical history is disseminated to children, and we’re told that the Whelan family in particular has an important tie to Salem history because their ancestor Sarah Good (the actual name of one of the accused) was the custodian of this book that will bring down all of witchkind and make non-magicals subservient, Phoebe did not know that the Salem victims were hanged and not burned.

I’m also not sure how I feel about using a real event where mostly women were sent to their death as a plot point in your book by having made them really witches—like the victims really did deserve it because they were what the puritans said they were, even if the witch scare was set off for reasons that didn’t make it into the historical record.

As I’m writing this review that has sealed my rating moving from a 2-star to 1-star. Solely based on the poor research and what is supposed to be one of the central points of this this world in this book—witchcraft and its history in the United States.

There are some weird things with names throughout this book. For starters Brandon said he seems to call Phoebe by her full name more than seems natural. Then after they first have sex, Phoebe starts calling Brandon “Bran”, which is a little weird. But for me the oddest part is when she would use this more familiar, shortened, endearing nickname. It just felt weird in the story when she was not trusting him or when she was mad at him but in her internal dialogue since this is in the first person she was calling him Bran instead of Brandon.

“... this could never last. But I knew I’d be OK. What a pretty little lie.“ Why could it never last? Why are you starting this out assuming that it’s going to end? And what pretty little lie did you tell, because you did seem to be OK.

It got pretty exhausting how, especially in the early part of this novel, there was this can-I-or-can’t-I-trust-him thing going on. It seemed constant. There was a point where Phoebe said how she was “so tired of having to constantly evaluate whether I could trust him, and how much.“ Jesus. That makes two of us.

It devolved into some bad romance novel junk... how she “wanted him”, his eyes were “hooded with lust” (wtf does that mean?). We have this scene, with some descriptions and actions that are not G rated (fingering, oral sex, kissing after oral sex, intercourse...), but the authors/the character continuously calls her clitoris her “nub”? Oh geez. The lovemaking scene was giving me secondhand embarrassment. I would much rather have had the author just describe some of the before and up to the after, but the sex scenes were cringe-worthy to me.

I didn’t like how, at it’s core, the plot just really seems to be a bunch of misogynists who were pissed that magical power is stronger when wielded by women. There are plenty of incels and MRAs running around, I don’t need to read about them for fun.

And in the end, very little we resolved. Basically they drove around a lot (if the council has a helicopter, why the cross-country road tripping?) and Phoebe got a boyfriend who were going to be forced to read too many sex scenes or PDA about (I wish I had a charm to use like her sisters). We don’t know just how Celeste got involved, what the council will do, how all these folks knew who was protecting the book, or even what Josie’s power is! How did she know Brandon could read minds, and why didn’t she just tell Phoebe that? We got plenty of tropes, an insecure female lead, and a predictable story line. Isn’t it convenient that Phoebe happened to have numerous relatives in Kansas, when though she never lived there, and it’s hammered into us that her family has lived in Ohio for generations in part to protect the book? This book felt like it was written simply to set up the other books, and I don’t think that’s fair to readers. A book should be enjoyable on its own, not simply a set up for when the actual stuff worth reading happens.

I may have changed my mind again. If I can find a detailed summary of the other book(s) in this series, I may just read those instead.… (meer)