Spells & Sorcery: Book Review + Giveaway (Blog tour)

I am so happy to be today’s host for Spells & Sorcery Blog Tour.
This ya fantasy was pretty quick read for me and I want to say thank you to Giselle from Xpresso Tours for giving me this opportunity.

Spells and Sorcery
S. Usher Evans
(Lexie Carrigan Chronicles, #1)
Publication date: October 4th 2016
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

You have magic.

One sentence, three words, four syllables. Enough to change my life forever. And I’m not talking about the whole spells and sorcery thing.

Lexie Carrigan thought the weirdest thing about her was she preferred watching documentaries and reading the newspaper to reality TV and Twitter. But on the eve of her fifteenth birthday, her aunt and sisters drop a bomb–she’s magical.

Now the girl who never made waves is blowing up her nightstand and trying to keep from wreaking havoc on her school. When a kind stranger shows up with all the answers, Lexie hopes he’ll be able to help her control her newfound powers. But Gavon may not be as kind as he seems, and soon Lexie finds out that being magical is the least weird thing about her.

Spells and Sorcery is the first YA fantasy from S. Usher Evans, author of the Razia series, the Madion War Trilogy and Empath.

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / iBooks / Kobo

 

Author Bio:

S. Usher Evans is an author, blogger, and witty banter aficionado. Born in Pensacola, Florida, she left the sleepy town behind for the fast-paced world of Washington, D.C.. There, she somehow landed jobs with BBC, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic Television before finally settling into a “real job” as an IT consultant. After a quarter life crisis at age 27, she decided consulting was for the birds and rekindled a childhood passion for writing novels. She sold everything she owned and moved back to Pensacola, where she currently resides with her two dogs, Zoe and Mr. Biscuit.

Evans is the author of the Razia series, Madion War Trilogy, and Empath, published by Sun’s Golden Ray Publishing.

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

My Review:

It has been awhile since I read ya fantasy, but when I saw the cover for Spells and Sorcery and read it’s synopsis, I knew I wanted to give it a try.

The story follows Lexie who, on her 15th birthday, finds out she has magical powers.
She and her sisters are witches. They lost their parents so their aunt (who is also a witch) took them under her roof.

I went into this book without high expectations, but with a lot of adrenaline (not literary, but you know what I mean).
I was on, ready to love it to bits and to finish it as fast as I could.

First thing didn’t happened, but the second one did!

I read this book in a record time – just one day!
Who’d say I could read 386 pages in just one day?
I certenly wouldn’t!

What I’m trying to tell you here is that the writing style is pretty easy to read and it makes you turn those pages even if the story is not too original nor interesting enough.

I came to conclusion that Evans has put so much energy into describing this world and how the magic system works, that in a way she forgot to make interesting side stories that would keep this book compelling.

There was no secondary stories then the main one. All that this book was about was Lexie finding out about magic and doing researches about this new system. It was like she had no life before her 15th birthday.

What bothered me the most was how she was always alone, without any friends to mention, while she was still going to public school she went to prior her birthday that changed her life.
There are only two people that are mentioned briefly: Joel and Callista, and Lexie didn’t even have a normal conversation with them through the whole story.
If she was a loner, bullied, rebel or someone no one wanted to talk to, I would understand, but in this case it felt like an author simply forgot to create a decent teenage life for her character.

Let me ask you this: do you think Harry Potter books (and I appologize to compare this book with HP because they are not similar at all, the only thing in common they have is magic) would be so good if Harry didn’t have Ron and Hermione by his side? If he was an outcast without friends, do you think people around the world would enjoy reading those books so much? I don’t think so, because friendship has a big part in those stories.

Here, there was a great potential to make Spells and Sorcery so much more interesting.
If Lexie had a friend by her side when exploring this new world and her abilities within it, this book would be so much more fascinating.

It surely wouldn’t feel like reading a magic encyclopedia as it felt at some points.

Another thing I didn’t like was how Lexie’s sisters left her all alone in this new situation she found herself in.
They were not helping her at all, and I can imagine that if they knew Lexie will get her powers at age of 15, they should have prepared her for it years ago.

That leads me to my third complain (or have I lost my count?): If her sister pepared her for what was coming, Lexie wouldn’t have to take instructions from some strange middle aged man who just showed up out of nowhere.

That was too weird (and I could see from the biginning who he really was because that was the only thing that was logical to me).
What was even weirder was how Lexie didn’t have the need to tell anyone about Gavon (that is his name) or how all she wanted to do was spend time with him (and now I’ll probably sound sick to some of you, especially if you read the book and know his story, but she wasn’t even attracted to him).

The last 5 chapters were the best in the story.
Everything before that felt like a slow overtire, and then, in the last 5 chapters, the real story began.

Overall, this was a quick story to pass time, and will probably appeal to younger audence.

 

Giveaway (INTL):

Tour-wide giveaway (INTL)

• Paperback copy of Spells and Sorcery + swag
• ends November 3rd

a Rafflecopter giveaway
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You can also enter to win ebook on Twitter by retweeting this tweet !