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Oct 24, 2017dreams_in_blue rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
I heard very good things about this series and so I went into this with very high expectations...and sadly those expectations were completely unmet. Basic plot of the story, spoiled selfish girl lived in India and after her mother's death gets sent to England where she wanted to be all along, and oh there's magic. There were three main things that I had a problem with in this entire book, (there was a lot more as well but these were the three that were constant) so to let you know here's some lists of what I didn't care for. *Gemma. She is annoying, spoiled, whinging about the whole time and just basically a bland boring character. She really didn't have much (if any) depth, nor did I feel that she really grew as a character. There wasn't really any arc to speak of. Granted she did feel guilty about bringing the magic into the real world, but she never really stood up to her "friends" and never really made me feel for her. Also, every single side character seemed to lack any sort of depth or defining character. (I can understand some of the girls being shallow and not very well-rounded characters because it is about a girl's school so therefore you will have many characters that are just on the sidelines but when it's all of them? And when you can't actually differentiate from one of Gemma's friends to herself because they all sound the same? Yeah, no.) *the writing style/lack of plot. Girl has argument with mom. Mom dies (this is not a spoiler, this happens in the first chapter). Girl gets sent to place she wants. Girl finds magic. (That is literally the plot of this book) This was full of info-dumps and 'random' coincidences that all happened to tie together and get everything all nicely presented. However, the problem with having tons of info-dumps meant that for most of the book I was supremely confused as to not only how they did certain things, but also the reasoning behind it. I felt like this author had a good idea, but it got hidden because we had no clue about this world or the magic or anything about this. There were scenes when they would do something and it just wouldn't make any sense with what might have been told to us earlier. Also with the general lack of plot or moving forward or anything like that, there were so many chapters when I just thought "this is still going on?" * The casual fat/ugly shaming and self harm that is not only never addressed, but pretty much ignored. Ann is fat. Ann is ugly. How do we know this? Because it is mentioned every single time that she is brought up in conversation; she also self-harms, gee I wonder why she would want to self-harm when people tell her to her face about this all the time. And Gemma (who is supposed to be the heroine of the story) doesn't stand up for her, doesn't become a friend for any purpose then it serves her purpose. Those were the main things that I really intensely disliked about this book. I have to say, I think that this might be a case of "it's not the book for me" because I know that a lot of people loved this series and think it's amazing. However, it's just not my cup of tea. If you liked it, awesome! If not, awesome as well. We all have different opinions on books so that's a great thing!