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mmuutthh's review
4.0
In accordance with the novel’s acknowledgments, this is not me yelling at the authors. But I really feel if you’re going to write a book about multiple cultures and their magic/belief systems and mythologies, you need to go deeper than internet searches and the stereotypical, trope-filled Hollywood movies that tend to all come at these same topics from racist and colonialist perspectives. (This is not calling this book or these authors either of those descriptors…) Using terms like “exotic” and “foreign” are othering and in a book that’s meant to be uniting these disparate groups, those words should not be allowed. People are not a monolith so it would’ve been nice to understand that the Egyptian and the Native American and the Haitian aren’t just cookie cutter versions of those groups we’ve seen before. They shouldn’t speak with stilted English or when using their magic default to the most basic and obvious… touchstones. (Snakes and bears and lions [which are different than sphinxes] are so cliche…)
Other than that — and that’s a big hurdle to get over — I thought the book was kind of fun. I’m not one to say two white dudes can’t write a young girl (or multiple girls or people of other ethnicities), and I think the book mostly works in the way teenage girls were represented in like 80/90s pop-culture. (Is that right or wrong? I can’t say, because I’m also just another white dude. But, again, none of them felt different from what I’ve seen/read before.) There were moments I totally forgot this was even meant to take place in modern times. I mostly just felt a little let down that the book was shooting for middle of the road Harry Potter meets the X-Men, and didn’t really give me pretty much anything new. It didn’t give me anything bold or something I felt I’d never seen/read before. And, hey, that’s the problem (especially in this day and age, right) where writers get in trouble because readers have pretty much seen it all.
Also there’s just WAY too many errors in the book, and with two authors I felt like some of this stuff should’ve really been caught before going to print. So, 4 stars.
Other than that — and that’s a big hurdle to get over — I thought the book was kind of fun. I’m not one to say two white dudes can’t write a young girl (or multiple girls or people of other ethnicities), and I think the book mostly works in the way teenage girls were represented in like 80/90s pop-culture. (Is that right or wrong? I can’t say, because I’m also just another white dude. But, again, none of them felt different from what I’ve seen/read before.) There were moments I totally forgot this was even meant to take place in modern times. I mostly just felt a little let down that the book was shooting for middle of the road Harry Potter meets the X-Men, and didn’t really give me pretty much anything new. It didn’t give me anything bold or something I felt I’d never seen/read before. And, hey, that’s the problem (especially in this day and age, right) where writers get in trouble because readers have pretty much seen it all.
Also there’s just WAY too many errors in the book, and with two authors I felt like some of this stuff should’ve really been caught before going to print. So, 4 stars.
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