It eas ok. Finished. But not compelling ( )

What i liked was the incorporation of a witch society in modern times. They use the internet and even discover the MC as she browses the web and is discovered by some magical coding that detects witches and she is added to a witch-Chat-Channel...
So the setting is nice. What was not so good is the story with not much tension and making a four year old the second important character in the book. Sorry if you disagree but powerful children don't work for me. They are always way to artificial - too understanding and clever on the one side and too deliberately acting childish on the other side.
An okay kind of book. ( )

I read this and the second book in the series and I think I am going to probably stop there. The author Debora Geary started off with a really cool idea. What if there were witches out there and based on modern times are starting to see there kind dwindle. A group of witches in CA and those in Nova Scotia have trained and been family and friends with each other for decades.

One of the witches who is apparently a complete coding genius (Nell) and her younger brother (Jamie) created a "fetch" spell in order to find new witches out there. Well due to an accident a woman who does not realize that she is a witch is fetched and has her life turned upside down.

Though the book synopsis makes it seem as if Lauren is the main character in this book she is not. Instead there are several characters who heads we pop in and out of during the course of the book with Nell and Jamie just a couple of the character's we beep bop in and out of during the course of the book.

There is a bare whisper of a plot in this book and more often than not is forgotten by describing people just eating ice cream, cookies, and disparaging eating anything that is leafy or green.

There is also barely any description of certain witches powers or what they mean and often I was just confused about what it meant to have a power fire, water power, or mind power. Also if the witches are tied to the four elements I honestly don't see what element anyone with mind powers or the power to teleport (or port as it is called in this book) comes from.

And that fellow readers is the main issue I have with this book. There is not enough backstory or explanation for anything in this first book. If you are going to world build on the scale that Ms. Geary is trying to do here there should be some explanation for things and how they all tied together. All I really learned in this book is that males can be witches too.

This and the lack of character development with anyone introduced into this book just made this a very dry and not enjoyable read for me. Every character from Lauren, Nell, Jamie, Lauren's best friend Nat, Moira (the grandmother of some but not all of the witches) has the exact same voice. You would think that Jamie being a male would be distinctive, but honestly no he and the rest of the characters all sound exactly alike. It does not help that Ms. Geary does not describe any of the characters she is talking about. Instead we hear that Jamie is tall dark and handsome. Okay, but how tall is tall? Does he have dark black hair, or dark brown hair, what color are his eyes? The same problem continues when Ms. Geary tries to describe a place (like Chicago) besides saying it is cold and wet outside I could be in any city on the east coast in the middle of winter. There is no real flavor to anything she describes.

To make the book better I think having the chapters broken up with the character who was narrating that section/chapter of the book (also the layout of the book was confusing with weird breaks here and there) so that way a reader would not get confused. Also it would have been better to keep the main plot line being about Lauren and her discovering that she is a witch. Instead we had other characters' issues bubbling up in this book and you just want to throw your hands up and say who cares. There is also no real tension or issue to resolve so that also makes it a very flat read. I am not saying you need to go up against a big bad in every book but there should be something there that is going to keep readers interest. Just reading about people using spells, coming into magical powers, and eating a lot of cookies and ice cream gets boring. ( )

I absolutely loved this book, and quickly devoured the series to date.

It's more about family, really - this extended family just consists of mostly witches. ( )

This was a fun quick read. Yes it is more stream of consciousness than plot driven but still fun. The historical accounting of Salem was way off. The only witch burnings were in Europe during the Inquistion not America, we just hung and pressed people to death. And the discriptions of how to do a circle as they call it or ritual were not in line with most traditions of Wicca.

But for brainless fun read, not too bad ( )