Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

CW: Suicide, some sexuality This novel started out with an interesting concept: two witch sisters, abandoned by their parents, attempting to make a life for themselves in the city. They run a little shop where they sell treasures they discover along the river. Each sister has a magical gift. Edwina has an eye for spotting treasures. But her sister Mary's gift is more unusual and stranger. She can pull the memories from the recently deceased and form them into solid gem-like objects. While the premise is interesting, both Mary and Edwina are underdeveloped and flat characters. The detective/love interest Ian is equally flat. He jumps in and out of a Scottish accent in a way that is jarring to the reader. Since he's lost his memory he has no backstory in the beginning, but once he regains his memory there isn't really much more to him. The romance between Ian and Edwina doesn't go over very well. It lacks tension, believability, and heat. The mystery itself has a very poor pay-off. There isn't a surprise. And because the characters are underdeveloped there is no emotional pay-off either. The prose is not very good. I found myself wanting to get away from this book and read prose of a better quality. Emotions are described but not in a way that one can empathize with the character. We are often told what a character is feeling, but the emotion doesn't seem to be there. We have to take the author's word for it. There are many descriptions that are unnecessary. The writing lacked style and I was bored by the prose. Many of the metaphors used were clichés and the author would have been better served not to use any metaphors at all. The reading level is probably around junior high, but there is some sexual content that I think many people would consider inappropriate for that age. Additionally, there is some slut-shaming, as if being un-chaste is part of being the villain in this story. For the book to have a true emotional pay-off, Edwina and Mary's relationship needed to be much more developed. But it was hard to get much of a sense of their closeness. Mary is so flat that it's hard to sympathize with her at all. Yet it is disturbing that the novel casts her in the role of someone who is mentally ill or a drug addict because of a magical power she was born with. There are some good ideas here, but overall the execution is poor. I had to push myself to finish the book and in the end I was disappointed that I bothered. One thing I did like was the description of Edwina and Mary's shop. It's the one location in the book that has some character to it. I don't recommend this book. It might have been something better with a serious rewrite, but as is it's too weak in characterization, style, and plot to be worth reading. It was mildly entertaining at best. To add to the annoyance, the ending is a cliffhanger and some mysteries in the book (the missing parents, the final cliffhanger that is meant to lead into a second book but seems to come out of nowhere) are left unsolved. I didn't enjoy the book enough to read a sequel and I would have preferred to have everything wrapped up at the end. Instead, I would suggest the Resurrection of Magic series by Kathleen Duey. While the third book may or may not be released (probably depending on whether or not interest in the first two makes a resurgence), the first two books (Skin Hunger and Sacred Scars) are brilliantly written with strong character development, scintillating descriptions, and intriguing plotlines. The relationships between the characters are much stronger, working with similar themes of romance, betrayal, and magic in world that has treated magic with hostility. The prose is much stronger and the emotional payoffs feel earned. I think the Ravel Spell has promise, but to me it reads like an early draft. It probably needs at least a couple of rewrites to realize its full potential.