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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
mysterious
medium-paced
I don't know how anyone could say this is similar to Harry Potter. They aren't really at all alike.
It was a nice simple story & I found it enjoyable.
Also, it's very obvious who Charlie's dad is.
It was a nice simple story & I found it enjoyable.
Also, it's very obvious who Charlie's dad is.
fast-paced
entertaining! I have a number of gripes which basically amount to "it seems like this book was written for children". It was a bit darker than I expected, given that it was in fact written for children.
WHY is Olivia Vertigo wearing stilettos? She's ELEVEN
WHY is Olivia Vertigo wearing stilettos? She's ELEVEN
I love this series. I found them when I was waiting for one of the Harry Potter's to come out. It is in the same genre but a very different style, more mystical.
adventurous
lighthearted
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
This is a sincere critique/roast of this book.
This book suffers from lazy writing, poor character development, plot conveniences, bad pacing, and disjointed world building. A lot of people have compared it to the HP series, and it certainly has its obvious similarities. But, unlike Harry Potter, it’s almost completely joyless. Honestly, I can find hardly anything to like about it. I read six other books before I could bring myself to pick this back up and finish it off. If you have read the HP series, this isn’t worth your time because the writing is a major step down in quality. It lacks any sophistication. This book sometimes has a YA tag, but it absolutely isn’t. This is Middle Grade, through and through (I like MG, so it’s not about that. I’m just saying that the writing is not YA.) Whatever you feel about Harry Potter now that its author has made a complete ass of herself, the writing is still better than this, and more well thought out. Even if you haven’t read Harry Potter and are looking for an alternative, I still wouldn’t suggest this. Though, if you’re looking to pick it up anyway, I definitely wouldn’t pay full price, considering that I found two almost pristine hardcover volumes at Goodwill and it only cost me 4 dollars for both of them.
This book suffers from lazy writing, poor character development, plot conveniences, bad pacing, and disjointed world building. A lot of people have compared it to the HP series, and it certainly has its obvious similarities. But, unlike Harry Potter, it’s almost completely joyless. Honestly, I can find hardly anything to like about it. I read six other books before I could bring myself to pick this back up and finish it off. If you have read the HP series, this isn’t worth your time because the writing is a major step down in quality. It lacks any sophistication. This book sometimes has a YA tag, but it absolutely isn’t. This is Middle Grade, through and through (I like MG, so it’s not about that. I’m just saying that the writing is not YA.) Whatever you feel about Harry Potter now that its author has made a complete ass of herself, the writing is still better than this, and more well thought out. Even if you haven’t read Harry Potter and are looking for an alternative, I still wouldn’t suggest this. Though, if you’re looking to pick it up anyway, I definitely wouldn’t pay full price, considering that I found two almost pristine hardcover volumes at Goodwill and it only cost me 4 dollars for both of them.
I wanted to like this series because I like the fantasy school trope. This book came out when I was 12. I never got around to it, so when I saw the first two volumes at the thrift store, I wanted to give them a try. Sadly, this is truly just a more dulled-out rip-off of the aforementioned series, with a main character not capable of holding my attention. Sure, it’s different to some extent, but there are many striking similarities (even the main character having messy hair), which is its ultimate downfall, because all the similarities are there, but way less interesting and creative, without exception. The plot feels disjointed and not properly thought out, like it was written in chunks and smushed together. There’s magic, but it’s not even complicated enough to be called a soft magic system. People just have random powers and they’re rarely even used. The school aspect seemed like a last-ditch effort and terribly flawed way to tie the plot together, which doesn't work well. And to top it all off, there's the characters and how completely contrived and soulless they feel. I couldn’t connect with them because they have little to no depth.
Firstly, the adults in Charlie’s life are nothing short of infuriating. Charlie has no competent adults to look out for his best interests (until around the end when his uncle steps up), not even his mother! The reason Charlie is forced to switch schools and go to this school for gifted kids is because his mother and grandmother will be thrown out on the street because his father’s family owns the house. Charlie is tricked into revealing his power and his evil grandmother and her sisters give him an ultimatum. Go to this school or get out. So, that’s supposed to be it. We’re supposed to just buy the fact that Charlie is having to take responsibility for the well-being of his mother and other grandmother. But he’s a kid, you know? That just seems unforgivably shitty to me. If anything, his mother and grandmother are even worse in a way than his father’s side of the family, which is outright loathsome. Instead of finding a way to make things work without relying on her dead husband’s family, the mother just throws in the towel and lets Charlie bear the brunt of the burden, when he’s just a kid. I think if she really cared about her son, she would have found a way to make things work without him being beholden to the abusive members of his dead father’s family. I get that this is essential to the whole (broken) plot, but how are we supposed to feel sympathetic toward the people Charlie is trying to protect? The stakes felt low to me because I didn’t care about what would happen to them. They are failures as guardians and totally complicit in Charlie’s suffering. The problem is that the author tries to write them sympathetically. The mom is clearly portrayed as this pathetic, washed out, shadow of a woman, but I still did not care. At all. Lots of people lose their spouses. The author needed to come up with a more compelling reason than what was given to us. It’s implied that the father’s family is powerful and to be feared, but that’s not the reason we’re presented with, and it’s the author’s responsibility to make you feel something for the characters (Oh, and we're not actually given any strong reason to believe the evil grandmother and her sisters are powerful or scary. They never actually express their powers, to my remembrance. They're just horrible people.)
That segways neatly into how the author has decided to make Charlie sympathetic to the reader. Charlie is a powerless kid surrounded by abusive or completely inept adults, and older more powerful kids who act as the bullies. He tries to bridle against his controlling environment a bit, but there really isn’t much he can do, and that sucks. I sympathized with that. The problem is that’s about the only positive emotion I felt involving Charlie. Charlie is just not an interesting boy, nor is he very smart. And that may be the point for all I know, but as a main character he is so dull, and I actually found his friend Benjamin more interesting. You can make your main character identifiable to average kids, while still making them compelling and unique. Charlie has no ambitions or interests that set him apart, which sets him up to be the type of main character who just has things happen to them. He’s a conduit for the plot and little else, and the plot isn’t even that good to begin with. I cared about Charlie being in unfair situations he had no control over, but I didn’t really feel anything about Charlie himself because he isn’t interesting enough to care about otherwise. It doesn’t help that Charlie makes naïve, often stupid decisions and we’re not given reasoning for why he thinks they are good decisions. That’s just not good writing. I get that he’s a kid, but there are sections where he puts a major amount of trust into characters he just met a week or two ago, and somehow we’re supposed to accept that, no questions asked. Questions like: Who is THAT stupid? A main character can have a lot of flaws, but a stupid main character is less forgivable. It makes you lose respect for them, and you lose emotional investment, which I had little of to begin with. The author writes many unfair situations that hinder Charlie’s progress, and it got to the point where I felt like Charlie was just not clever enough to navigate his way through the story. I often felt extremely frustrated and would put the book down because it got so annoying. He’s like this sad pinball in a machine, bouncing from one bad situation to another, with no idea what’s going on. It became quite predictable. He shapes up to some degree during the latter half of the book, but it was too late at that point. Even then there are side characters moving the plot along more than he is. As if that wasn't enough, Charlie’s power has an enormous flaw, which allows others to know when he’s using it to get information about them. This renders his ability almost useless in most cases. I don’t even know why the author felt the need to disadvantage him in that way. He rarely uses his magic as it is.
Any other characters were either written as mysterious, or quirky to the extreme, or both, in order to make them ‘interesting’ enough without actually fleshing them out. We’ve got the smiling boy/tutor musician who seems weirdly happy all the time, we have the mysterious cat man who keeps breaking into people’s houses, we’ve got a random lady who thinks giving a dangerous locked case to a child is a good idea as long as she doesn’t have to deal with it anymore, and we have an Uncle who occasionally helps Charlie, but who otherwise doesn’t really seem to give a shit until later in the book. Oh, and I can’t forget the quirky girl who wears high heels even though she’s only eleven or something, and then falls down a flight of stairs in the dark because she’s too stupid to be practical. There’s also the pathetic orphan boy who talks to animals and is easy to manipulate and who we're supposed to feel pity for when he makes dumb decisions. None of these characters are fleshed out enough for me to care about. The only remotely likeable characters are Charlie’s Uncle Paton, and his friend Benjamin. And then, taking his rightful place at the top of the list is Benjamin’s dog, Runner Bean, who is the best character as far as I’m concerned. That is only 25% a joke. I’m mostly serious. That’s how badly these characters are written. Runner Bean has more common sense than Charlie.
Another issue I have is that everything going on in the story just feels bleak, miserable, or angry. Charlie is miserable at home because his family sucks, and instead of using the transition to the school as an opportunity to make things more interesting, the school also turns out to be a miserable place full of stupidly antiquated rules like cape wearing, quiet hallways, and segregated dining and study areas according to what ‘gift’ you have. It’s supposed to be this posh academy, but somehow the food is shitty and low quality, and the bedrooms are described as a “bleak, low-beamed room with bare floors and a single, dim light. There were six beds, placed uncomfortably close to one another, on both sides of the long room. The beds were narrow and covered with woolen blankets.” Okay, so is this an orphanage then? The author initially gives you the impression of it being a prestigious school for gifted children and prominent, rich families, but then contradicts herself and describes it as though it’s an orphanage with no funds?? It makes no damn sense. It’s like she purposely went out of her way to make it as miserable as possible. It does nothing for the plot at all and was a terrible choice since there’s already barely any point for the school being there in the first place. It’s just there because the bedrock of the story is poorly developed, and I think it was the only thing she could think of. Due to this incredibly poor choice, the story suffers greatly along with the characters, because there is no reprieve from the misery and outright boredom of sameness. The misery isn’t even satirical or amusing, like the way it’s portrayed in A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s just a slog with no end in sight.
Lastly, the pacing is a mess. There are multiple instances where, instead of putting a visual cut to indicate a change in perspective, the author just switches characters in the next paragraph with no warning. It took a little past the halfway point for the plot to engage me at all. I’m talking over 200 pages in. Because the pacing is poor, there are whole scenes of characters spouting exposition, instead of gradually letting it unfold by showing us. Not to mention the many instances of plot conveniences, many of them unfair and infuriating. You could see them coming from a mile away, but it was no less annoying when they happened; characters being in the wrong place at the wrong time, characters making stupid decisions in order for something bad to happen, characters being lied to and buying it without a second thought, characters who are only talked about in passing in one or two scenes, but then end up being a key aspect of the plot at the end, etc. To me this felt incredibly lazy and insulting to the demographic it’s aimed toward. I’m blown away that this series has eight volumes, plus two spin-off volumes. How?
I recently re-read The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe in close succession to this. That book is less than half the length and I was still more invested in the characters and their success than I was in this book that is double the length. This entire story seems like a rough draft to me. It needed to be completely revamped from the bottom up. As it is, I feel this series was just trying to breeze by on the hype that HP created around that time, with as little effort as possible. I regularly read middle grade and even children’s books as an adult and this one pales in comparison to many of the other offerings out there, Deltora Quest being one series that comes to mind. I don’t think it would have been too hard to put a little more effort into making this a better, more cohesive story. If you read this as a kid and love it partially for nostalgia, that’s totally understandable, but I saw at least a handful of reviews here saying it wasn’t nearly as good as they remember it. The nail in the coffin was the author’s bio, which is almost a page and a half long and felt weirdly braggy, like a resumé? All I could think was that maybe she should have put the same amount of effort into the actual story.
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No