3 stars
| I’ve had the Kindle version of this book for a while now, but I am so bad about actually reading the ebooks I have. While vacationing in Mexico, I decided to only read ebooks and settled on this one. Perfect length for reading in a week between wading in the ocean and pool activities. This was kind of a tricky book to review. I liked the concept of the story, but it was a little slow to start. The whole book kind of reads like a prequel, just setting up the action for the series. Many things happen, but they all seem to just set up later events in comparison to being important in and of themselves. The book also appears to be heavily influenced by Harry Potter. Not bad in its own right, but it’s just been done so many times before. There were a few good creative twists. I did like that it was an all girls school and the focus on female power. The overall story is kind of an all-girl witchy YA mashup of Divergent, The Hunger Games, and Harry Potter. Overall, the writing was good. Bianca gets stuck in her head a little too much at times, making her narration kind of annoying, but for the most part it was good. There are definitely ups and downs in the story. Sometimes you are really engaged with it and sometimes it’s just kind of going along. But overall, I enjoyed the book. There was a link for a free copy of the second book inside the ebook. I liked this one enough to download the second book and continue the series. Goodreads |