DNF at 20%. I liked Samiah and I enjoyed what I’ve seen of Taylor and London too, but I just do not like the male love interest AT ALL! No personality. Just very dry. 

I will try The Dating Playbook though because it sounds really good and has my favorite trope.

DNF at 7%. So confusing. I have no idea why the author keeps throwing out fantasy words, but not giving any context as to what those words mean. I really wanted to love this, but bad writing style is a deal breaker.

DNF at 25%. I wanted to love this so badly but the writing style was too info dump-y for me. And although I love the premise and I think I would like the characters, writing style is everything to me and I couldn’t get past it. Maybe I’ll try again another day.

I was so excited for this book. A book about an assassin school with a badass female main character. Sign me up.

However, as soon as I started this book I DNF’ed it for one huge reason and one small reason.

The small reason: those annoying footnotes. Every single time I had to take myself out of the flow of the story to read an unnecessary footnote, I rolled my eyes. They just screamed lazy writing. It’s like the writer read the final draft of the book and said, “Damn. I forgot to explain what’s happening.”, so he just added footnotes at the end instead of writing a good book.

The huge reason: the only Black characters in the book were labeled as “savages”. As soon as I read that I automatically sent it back to my library. THAT is what made this the only 1 star review I’ve ever written. I’m so happy I didn’t waste my money buying this.

DNF at 12%. When you’re 7 chapters into a book and have no idea what’s going on, it’s time to give up.

I waited on this book to come out for a year and I’m so disappointed! It was unnecessarily confusing. There were so many different terms introduced with no explanation of what they meant. I’d have to read a sentence 3-4 times before I either finally understood what it meant, or just gave up and moved on. There is a way to have an intricate magic system without confusing the reader, just ask Children of Blood and Bone. There was no way that I could remember a million character names, a million different magic types, the colors that coincided with each magic type, and a thousand different places. The writing style was way too convoluted.

The story also skipped around too much. I had no idea how a character got from point A to point E because the writer skipped important details, but dwelled on unnecessary ones that made no sense. I couldn’t even picture what was happening in the book because the scene descriptions were terrible. 

I really wanted to love this book! Two rival Jamaican witches out for revenge sounds like the book of dreams, but it wasn’t written well at all. Sadly, I think I have to give it one star…