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Location: United States

Member Since: March 17, 2011

Kelly Lester

Smashwords book reviews by Kelly Lester

The Trouble with Spells on Aug. 10, 2011

This is a YA novel that I got as a freebie when I read about it on a book tour. This is apparently its second printing. It sports a new and much improved (if you ask me) cover and supposedly has fixed grammatical and spelling errors. Um…I found quite a few spelling and grammatical errors in the book and while I don’t think I’m an expert in English, I easily found these so they really should be repaired. We meet Portia as she turns a sweet 16. She gets quite the birthday present too. First, she finds out she’s a witch and not only that, but she gets her very own warlock, one hot tamale by the name of Vance. Vance has some family problems, like his Dad hunting him down to either convert him over to the black arts or to kill him. Whichever comes first. We meet Portia’s friends in her high school and her adorable Grandmother who is also a witch (oh, did I forget to mention? So is her Dad. Mom isn’t but she knows all about everything going on around her.). There are some very tender, romantic love scenes between Portia and Vance, I’m talking very tender. There are some life lessons built in too. The best part of the book was the exciting end of the story which involves the actual death of some characters. This book is great fun, although a tad slow in the beginning, it winds up in an exciting ending that while a tad predicable, was still fun. This is a fun first book in the series and I imagine, will drive teens crazy with “what will Vance and Portia do next?” questions. This is a mix of the House of Night series, the Twilight series and the Immortals series. Teens will probably go absolutely crazy about this book. What I liked: I am SO gratefully that the teens in this story aren’t whiney poor me types that are in a lot of YA novels. That teen angst thing is OVER. I loved the “exciting” scenes because they really were exciting and kept me, as a reader, turning page after page. What I disliked: Sometimes I felt the author got a little too descriptive with things. The blow by blow, for example, between Portia and EMTs I found to be interesting on one level, but probably slow and unnecessary for the book. There were a few unnecessary descriptions for the book. It felt like the author had to get in a word count on her writing or something. It didn’t take away from the story, and it was a relatively quick read at just about 200 pages, so it wasn’t a huge deterrent to the book. I wasn’t very fond of the “cliffhanger” at the end of the story either. I was already hooked into the next books anyway. The cliffhanger really wasn’t necessary at that point.