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merlinagarance 's review for:
Motheater
by Linda H. Codega
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I'll preface this by saying this was my first time receiving an ARC from a publisher, rather than an indie author, and I'm appalled at the difference in quality.
The book is full of typos, including in the characters' names, with different spellings on one same page, missing full stops, missing words which make some sentences confusing/impossible to understand.
I think I'll give this publisher a pass in the future if this is their standard.
Now onto the story.
This was an okay read. Mostly, I felt it was trying too hard, and ended up being disappointing.
My first thought was that I expected, this being about a witch in the Appalachian, that the witch would be a native. Instead she's a white woman, daughter of a Pentacostal preacher. It rubbed me the wrong way that a white woman was the one centered in a book about magic connecting her so deeply to the land.
I didn't like Bennie. I found nothing compelling about her and just couldn't find it in me to care about her feelings or what happened to her. The romance felt forced and rushed. I think Bennie and Motheater spend two weeks together at most and they end up making big love confessions.
The whole thing with an alive mountain was the most interesting part to me, as well as the flashback chapters. I'd have been happy for this book to be a historical fantasy with chapters from Esther and Jasper's point of view, and more background on the magic, and how Esther became a witch. We only get a few lines about the pact she made with the mountain, when it's the centre of the plot.
The writing felt uneven. It was better in the flashback chapters, but had both many repetitions, basic sentence structure, and whole paragraphs accumulating metaphors when one would have done.
Overall, this read like a first draft, and not a book about to be published. I hope it got a good editing pass before then, but if it's just copy editing missing, I'm afraid that won't do the trick.
I read onto the 2/3 point because I was still intrigued about what would happen, but the plot was really slow for 70% of the book, and unravelled in the last few chapters really quickly.
Yeah, uneven would be a good word to summarize this.
I got an ARC from Netgalley and this is my honest opinion.
The book is full of typos, including in the characters' names, with different spellings on one same page, missing full stops, missing words which make some sentences confusing/impossible to understand.
I think I'll give this publisher a pass in the future if this is their standard.
Now onto the story.
This was an okay read. Mostly, I felt it was trying too hard, and ended up being disappointing.
My first thought was that I expected, this being about a witch in the Appalachian, that the witch would be a native. Instead she's a white woman, daughter of a Pentacostal preacher. It rubbed me the wrong way that a white woman was the one centered in a book about magic connecting her so deeply to the land.
I didn't like Bennie. I found nothing compelling about her and just couldn't find it in me to care about her feelings or what happened to her. The romance felt forced and rushed. I think Bennie and Motheater spend two weeks together at most and they end up making big love confessions.
The whole thing with an alive mountain was the most interesting part to me, as well as the flashback chapters. I'd have been happy for this book to be a historical fantasy with chapters from Esther and Jasper's point of view, and more background on the magic, and how Esther became a witch. We only get a few lines about the pact she made with the mountain, when it's the centre of the plot.
The writing felt uneven. It was better in the flashback chapters, but had both many repetitions, basic sentence structure, and whole paragraphs accumulating metaphors when one would have done.
Overall, this read like a first draft, and not a book about to be published. I hope it got a good editing pass before then, but if it's just copy editing missing, I'm afraid that won't do the trick.
I read onto the 2/3 point because I was still intrigued about what would happen, but the plot was really slow for 70% of the book, and unravelled in the last few chapters really quickly.
Yeah, uneven would be a good word to summarize this.
I got an ARC from Netgalley and this is my honest opinion.