Abandoned by Booklikes

I have struggled with this review and have started and deleted it about a dozen times. I think this is because I don't know what to say about a book that I consider in the end to be a serviceable book, but not very memorable.

I love magical realism books and am always on the lookout for more authors that write in this genre. I adore Alice Hoffman, Sarah Addison Allen, and was quite happy to discover author Menna van Praag as well. I was hoping to add Ms. Painter to my list of go to authors who write in this genre, but was let down with the overall story-line and development of the characters in her book.

I gave this book three stars because I felt that the main character and other characters were not written well enough for me to really get a sense of them, there was a lack of details concerning the magic, the slow pace of the book, and the constant contradictions that came up while I was reading.

The main character Gwen at times dances between being a TSTL romance heroine and a strong woman who knows magic. I think that if we had seen more of her as being strong and not falling apart everytime her love interest Cam ignored her or her sister was mean to her, I could have liked the character more. I also think if we had been told the story and history of Gwen, the town of Pendleford, her family, and her relationship with Cam in a linear way it would have made for a faster read.

The other characters in the book are not written with enough detail for me to even pick them out of a line-up. Gwen's older sister Ruby is ashamed of Gwen's magic abilities and warns her off of telling her 14 year old daughter Katie.

We also have Gwen and Ruby's mother Gloria who we hear about in dribs and drabs, but I can't get much of a sense of at all.

Then we get to Gwen's love interest Cam who was constantly wishy-washy on Gwen until almost the end of the book (yeah a hum-drum romance, totally my not favorite thing to read).

There is also the mustache twirling villain that I was able to deduce within the first couple of pages. It would have made the final denouement more exciting if the reader and Gwen had not been clued into the fact that this person was all wrong. However, the readers will probably figure it out ages before Gwen does. And when Gwen figures it out and realizes what this person has done she passively keeps allowing things to keep happening to her (that's where the TSTL comes in).

Another issue I had while reading was that anything that deals with magic was pretty much glossed over or handwaved away. There was way too much tell and not enough show for me. I think having Gwen describe herbs, different spells she learned, the meaning of those spells, etc. would have been really great and added to the overall book. We get to a key scene at the end of the book and Gwen is supposedly repeating every anti-hex incantation that she ever learned and that she could feel all of the former (and in her mother's case, present) Harper women flowing through her. It could have been a really great moment with more details included, instead I was just left cold by the whole thing.

In addition to the above, the entire book was a slow read. And I don't mean like A Discovery of Witches slow read with intricate details on the origin of magic, spells, etc. This was a slow read in which it felt as if for every step forward we took in the story, we took two steps back. As I said earlier, if the story had been told linear I think it would have helped with this immensely. For example, it took almost halfway through the book before I figured out what incidents pushed Gwen to run away and leave Cam. I am not a fan of info dumps in books for the most part, but there needs to be a happy medium. I struggled to finish this book because it felt like things were just happening to Gwen and she was reacting to them.

Besides all this, there were also some inconsistencies on how Gwen and Cam were portrayed. For example, Gwen has rejected her magical ability when she was very young because of her mother's actions. However, she still uses this ability at 18 and then doesn't use it again for 13 years. We get no back-story that Gwen was trained at all. However, we have her knowing anti-hexes, and she can tell with a look when someone is under a hex (except when she doesn't) and how to prove it (apparently licking someone's skin). So my problem is how did she learn all of these spells and other things? Did Gwen look it up? Did she somehow do research? I just needed some more details included in the book that would have helped explain the contradiction I kept seeing.