Take a photo of a barcode or cover
atagarev 's review for:
Harley Merlin and the Secret Coven
by Bella Forrest
This book is just a mess. It starts out as a cookie cutter urban fantasy- a hidden magical world existing alongside our normal modern world, a protagonist with magical powers that doesn't know much about this world but has a mysterious secret backstory and special extra-magical powers, a mystery with monsters and betrayal and so on. Unfortunately the story just keeps getting more and more incoherent as the book goes on to the point where I am now at 90% of the book in the middle of the final confrontation and everything is so nonsensical and boring that I am seriously considering dropping the book altogether. Going over the various aspects of the book that left me disappointed in no particular order:
The mystery is a total failure. Once the villain was very abruptly revealed, the book had to hit the breaks and spend a few pages with the villain monologuing to an auditorium full of people because *almost none* of the who, how and why of the mystery had been previously set up. This is by far the clunkiest least satisfying "reveal" I've run across in years.
Characters' emotions and motivations are all over the place and constantly change. As a lazy shortcut to actually descriptive writing, our character is an empath so instead of observing people she just *knows* what they are feeling. Disappointing as that is, I could accept it except there are several people whose emotions she specifically cannot sense *at all*. This is just a clumsy solution to still having a "mystery" when your protagonist can effectively read everyone's mind. The issue is that these characters that she supposedly can't read were still *constantly* described in the same way e.g. "She couldn't sense his emotions at all but she could still feel that his anger was hiding a deeper sense of bla-bla-bla..." If our character can't read them then why are we getting an inventory of their emotions at any given moment?
Meanwhile our protagonist's emotions are all over the place. The last page I read before writing this review had her boiling with rage, driven by grim determination, frozen with fear, filled with hope and stunned with shock all in the scope of a hundred words or so. Its enough to give you emotional whiplash and while this was perhaps the most egregious example, its fairly representative of how her emotional state constantly and massively fluctuates.
The magic and the world make very little sense. What and how people can do is just totally random and the story flip-flops between everyone learning the exact same rigid spells with only very advanced "magicals" being able to invent new ones and everyone having their own unique abilities that others can't copy. At one point the "good guys" summon the spirit of a powerful deceased witch and wrestle with an ancient monstrous god in order to obtain ingredients for a spell but those ingredients are available for about $40 at a pharmacy or jewelry shop and they are all rich so its totally unclear why they decide to risk their lives *twice*. Said spell is really dangerous and only available from a forbidden library yet our newbies perform it in about a minute with no preparation and everyone recognizes the spell on sight. Meanwhile our protagonist switches between fighting homicidal monsters that are very hard to subdue and being the worst student in a class of 12-year-olds.
Finally, the action scenes are really awkward and confusing which is a problem because there are a lot of them. There is just no proper sense of space or time so its impossible to imagine what is actually going on, who is winning and who is in danger. There is also no real sense of danger- a leg gets paralyzed with poison then the character is running in the very next sentence, someone gets "engulfed in flames" while grappling someone else and the second person is unharmed, a character feels "all her knuckles breaking from the punch" (huh?) and it is never mentioned again. Its essentially just random disconnected descriptions.
So in short terribly executed "mystery," flat and nonsensical worldbuilding, emotionally inconsistent characters and poor writing especially obvious in the action scenes.
The mystery is a total failure. Once the villain was very abruptly revealed, the book had to hit the breaks and spend a few pages with the villain monologuing to an auditorium full of people because *almost none* of the who, how and why of the mystery had been previously set up. This is by far the clunkiest least satisfying "reveal" I've run across in years.
Characters' emotions and motivations are all over the place and constantly change. As a lazy shortcut to actually descriptive writing, our character is an empath so instead of observing people she just *knows* what they are feeling. Disappointing as that is, I could accept it except there are several people whose emotions she specifically cannot sense *at all*. This is just a clumsy solution to still having a "mystery" when your protagonist can effectively read everyone's mind. The issue is that these characters that she supposedly can't read were still *constantly* described in the same way e.g. "She couldn't sense his emotions at all but she could still feel that his anger was hiding a deeper sense of bla-bla-bla..." If our character can't read them then why are we getting an inventory of their emotions at any given moment?
Meanwhile our protagonist's emotions are all over the place. The last page I read before writing this review had her boiling with rage, driven by grim determination, frozen with fear, filled with hope and stunned with shock all in the scope of a hundred words or so. Its enough to give you emotional whiplash and while this was perhaps the most egregious example, its fairly representative of how her emotional state constantly and massively fluctuates.
The magic and the world make very little sense. What and how people can do is just totally random and the story flip-flops between everyone learning the exact same rigid spells with only very advanced "magicals" being able to invent new ones and everyone having their own unique abilities that others can't copy. At one point the "good guys" summon the spirit of a powerful deceased witch and wrestle with an ancient monstrous god in order to obtain ingredients for a spell but those ingredients are available for about $40 at a pharmacy or jewelry shop and they are all rich so its totally unclear why they decide to risk their lives *twice*. Said spell is really dangerous and only available from a forbidden library yet our newbies perform it in about a minute with no preparation and everyone recognizes the spell on sight. Meanwhile our protagonist switches between fighting homicidal monsters that are very hard to subdue and being the worst student in a class of 12-year-olds.
Finally, the action scenes are really awkward and confusing which is a problem because there are a lot of them. There is just no proper sense of space or time so its impossible to imagine what is actually going on, who is winning and who is in danger. There is also no real sense of danger- a leg gets paralyzed with poison then the character is running in the very next sentence, someone gets "engulfed in flames" while grappling someone else and the second person is unharmed, a character feels "all her knuckles breaking from the punch" (huh?) and it is never mentioned again. Its essentially just random disconnected descriptions.
So in short terribly executed "mystery," flat and nonsensical worldbuilding, emotionally inconsistent characters and poor writing especially obvious in the action scenes.