Tome Thursday: Scottish Witches Mysteries

 

Hello everyone!

 

And welcome back to the weekly blog post in which we take a look at different books or book series that I happen to be enjoying at the time.

 

Or, alternately, occasionally - and this is VERY occasionally - I run into something I don't like as much as I had hoped I would when initially picking something up.

 

Tonight is such a night, aka, the second option.

 

I had such high hopes for the series that I grabbed off BookSirens, like you wouldn't believe.

 

Then the more I read through it, the less I ended up liking it.

 

It's a crying shame really, because all the foundations for a great book series are right there! I don't really know what exactly went wrong, yet here we are.

 

We'll be talking about the Scottish Witches Mysteries, by Felicity Green.

 

As this is my one and only post about Ms Green's books, you won't find any links down at the bottom of the page.

 

Now, when I first found out about the series, I did so through the fourth book - then the last released, but there'll be more - and because I'm a little bit OCD and just enough pedantic, I wanted to read through them all so that I knew what was what.

 

ESPECIALLY since the same characters feature in all the books, pretty much!

 

The Witch Club is Andie's story, about a young member of the coven we're learning about who has to protect the local bed and breakfast owner, who's stubborn and uncovering secrets about her husband's disappearance ten years ago, which brings her into conflict with our witches.

It was a pain to get through. None of the characters are likeable (except the detective, who doesn't honestly count) and none of them particularly like each other, to the point where you start wondering why they even stay as part of the same group.

Dessie is incredibly weak, gullible, and spineless, bending every which way depending on who she interacts with (especially men, whew, if it's a man, you best believe she'll make excuses for anything he does just because).

Andie is catty and prejudiced and manages to botch up the simplest of things.

Grayson is a caricature villain.

None of the above is really convincing for a story, and while the idea itself - a con man conning his partner and then the aftermath investigation - has a solid foundation, it unfortunately gets overshadowed by shallow characterization and just a general meanness that prevents you from rooting for any character.

 

Herb Witch for Hire is Penny's story, the only one of the witches who makes money from her gift and is unapologetic about it (as she should be!) but who randomly takes in a runaway teenager who's pregnant and hiding from her very traditional family and even more traditional lover. 

This book is marginally better than the first, if only because I like Penny more than Andie.

But it goes downhill around the halfway point.

It's actually enjoyable to dig into Penny, her relationship with Pari, how she'll stop at nothing. Then the interference of these witches not liking each other begins again.

At this point I really don't know why they're even in a coven. Nobody seems to like anybody else, not really, and everyone's a hypocrite.

I give it 2 stars for Penny's personal development, but that's it.

 

Cooking Up a Witch tells us about Fiona, the witch with a great destiny ahead of her but who everyone puts down because they expected her to turn up awesome right out of the womb, and because babies don't perform miracles they were all disappointed. HER story could have been great given she's a mix of witch and magician but, alas, again ...

 

The coven is NOT functioning at all. Why does anyone want to be a part of it? Nobody likes anyone else, the older witches keep things from the next generation, they don't really teach them, and the next gen despise one another in a very cliquey way.
 

The positives here are that people SEEM to be coming together, but even so it's still tinged with light hypocrisy and judgement.

It's definitely a bit of a chore, unfortunately. It has all the elements to be really good, but the witches all behave like teenagers in high school.

 

And finally, A Witch Through Time. The one I REALLY wanted to read because it involved time travel as a unique concept (in that, when a witch travels to a certain moment, she can never go back to the one she left, thus hopping between different timelines). It's also combined with a murder investigation, which SHOULD have made it awesome.

But sadly it didn't quite live up to the hype.

I had been hoping to see more about how Maryanna time travelled, not just be told about it. That would have made for a really interesting story, I think, but the focus was unfortunately elsewhere.

The rest of the cast isn't as strong to reel me in for a fifth book, so this is where I leave them.

 

Like I said, a lot of these books had great starts - but then the unlikeable cast of characters who don't even seem to like one another to begin with turn you right off the page. Things get told to you in one sentence rather than having you experience it, so you kind of feel like you're reading through a routine recipe rather than an adventure.

 

This COULD have been great, but sadly falls short of being even mediocre. 

 

You win some, you lose some.

 

10/10 do not recommend.

 

xx

*images not mine