No Books, No Life

The Reluctant Witch by A.B. Wolverton

I received this book for free through Goodreads firstreads. This did not influence my review or rating in any way. First of all, I want to thank the author and Goodreads firstreads for giving me the awesome opportunity to read this book. Honestly, I'm not sure if I would have found out about this series if I wouldn't have seen in on the firstreads page, and I probably wouldn't have gone out to buy it either, just because at first I didn't know what to expect from it since I'm not that familiar with self-published books. Now I can honestly say that I will be more open-minded with books that aren't as over-hyped as others.

If I'm completely honest, I did have quite a few problems with this book. The characters seemed too young and immature, but they were very fleshed out and I feel like I actually knew them. I feel like the best aspect of the writing was how much the author described the qualities of all the characters and actually helped me better imagine them. The character that I liked the least was probably the main character just because she seemed too whiny to me, and too much like a Bella Swan from Twilight. She seemed to need help with everything, but at the same time seemed like she accepted that she was a witch way to fast. I also didn't like how fast all her friends accepted she was a witch and how they found out about it at basically the same time as her.

Another problem I had was that it seemed too unrealistic (I know that this is fantasy but still)that the animals could talk to her and tell her basically everything, never really wondering how she could understand them, or find it weird or different in any way. I feel that if it was the other way around and an animal talked to me, I would be pretty freaked out and might call a psychiatric hospital... That just seemed a little too fake and corny to me.

This is the last problem I had. How was she a witch and her brother wasn't? This didn't make sense to me... I'm hoping this will be explained more in the next book, and maybe it will explain how it took her so long to get her gifts instead of just being born with them. I will definitely be reading the next book and I ordered it from B+N. Unfortunately, it was ordered with a pre-order and it won't be shipped until March 24th... That's too long!!

Now for stuff I liked. I really liked the love interest. Henri was very likeable and probably the best character in the whole book. His feelings for Freda were realistic and I really felt that they were real and healthy. This brings me to another thing I didn't like though! I really did not like Freda's name. I don't know, it's just one of those names that sort of annoys me... Maybe it's because that's one of the characters in the movie Dumb and Dumber 2, but I'm not sure.

Overall, this was a pretty good book but it had too many spelling and grammatical errors for me to give it more than three stars. I understand it was self-published and really respect the author for being able to do that, I just feel like some of the mistakes were very easily caught and fixed if they had just had some people read it before it was published and alert the author to problems.

Thanks for reading!
~Bri