Saturday, July 27, 2013

2013 book 205

Sarah Beth Durst's Conjured
I have really enjoyed Durst's last few books, but this one didn't work for me quite as well. It has a great premise--a girl with magical abilities is in paranormal witness protection, but doesn't know who she is, and every time she has a vision, she loses huge chunks of her (newly formed) memories. There's also a whole romance thing with a boy who's a library page that takes up most of the rest of the book, and which I was pretty uninterested in. I mean, they literally do magic by kissing; it is  . . . not my thing. My main problem here, though, is that the characters feel really underdeveloped--they're basically cardboard cutouts, even the ones who /have/ their memories and know who they are. The world-building is strong, and the girl's background turns out to be kind of fascinating--I just wish this had had one more pass through an editor or something, because it just fell a little flat. B/B-.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.

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