Enchantress - James Maxwell

Enchantress by James Maxwell
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

My experience with this book:

✔ Cool cover.
✔ Prologue is intriguing.
✗ Nope, prologue is a lie - it's not even about that character, and we don't get to know them at all. Clue number one about the rest of the book.
✗ Amateurish writing.
✔ Light fantasy tone with cozy, comfy clichés, which are good sometimes.
✔ Girl who's going to study to be an enchantress.
✔ Brother who's learning the sword.
✗ Except we don't get to see any of the actual learning.
✔ Until we do!
✗ Except it's just so that we can have a reason to witness...
✗ Sudden, gratuitous death (murder!) of an innocent, stray animal.
✗ Followed shortly by sudden, gratuitous death of characters that you just barely start to know, let alone like. What?

Now it's just going downhill fast.
✗ The random-seeming gruesomeness of the deaths seems out of place with the tone of the rest of it.
✗ Who to be invested in?? What's the point of anyone??
✗ World-building all over the place, too many names and places that mean nothing.
✗ Starting not even to care about the main characters because of the choppiness.
✗ Where is this even going, and what's the point of anything?
✗ Now we're going to war and don't understand the world we're at war with because the world-building is so bad, and death is sure to follow, and sure to be meaningless.
✗ The knowledge that more random gruesomeness is to come. More characters that you glimpse and start to like will inevitably die just because you thought you might like them. You don't even have time to care.

Yet all is relayed in a light tone.

Incongruous and jarring...

DNF.