A. L. Kessler

This first book was surprisingly good but it was just a glimpse of the world of "Here Witchy Witchy".
Sadly, bad shortcomings that are not obvious in this one become more apparent in later books.

Let's talk about the things that rubbed me the wrong way.
There is aplomb and there are suddenly forgotten/vanished emotions.
This book as a lot of trouble trying to do the first but ending up with the second.

There are "show, don't tell" problems consisting of constantly repeated assertions about the mc but its worse than that. The "tell" directly contradicts the "show" in a very distracting way sometimes.
The so-called Paranoia for example. We are constantly, exhaustingly told that the mc has been taught to be paranoid from an early age and how extremely paranoid she is about everything.
But in reality, she is acting everything but paranoid considering her circumstances. She may think a slightly paranoid thought every now and then if you squint at best. I just don't understand where this is coming from. The only reason I can think of is that the author wrote down "Paranoid" when she drafted the protagonist and for some reason had to frantically hold onto this character trait at all cost.
There are a few of those "traits" or "facts" throughout the series that are repeated ad nauseam without ever being backed up by a single action anywhere.
"Strongest witch" is another of those. That one at least is corrected by the mc herself later on in the series.
Interestingly this only happens with traits we can not observe ourselves which indicates that the author must've been aware that there is not enough showing happening and tried to compensate by just repeating it often enough.
It's particularly baffling because there aren't a lot of other mistakes of this sort anywhere else in this first book.… (meer)