#then again maybe I'm just making this whole project needlessly complicated or myself

[plantdad-dante]

Book #81 - Payback’s A Witch by Lana Harper

(first time read, + the only book in this series I will read) The saddest thing is, I really thought I would like it. The premise had sounded so fun - three witches take revenge on the asshole who hurt them... It could have been so badass. They could have actually outsmarted him, bested him through the unexpected power of team work, forged friendship and love on the way, and then truly lingered on the moment in the climax when everything would have come crashing down on him and he realized in humiliation that payback truly is a witch. But, alas... that's not what I got. Instead what I got was a Hallmark christmas movie set in Halloween Town starring an inferiority complex the size of Chicago, an abysmally paced tournament plot, all-over-the-place lore and a romance that was ninety percent horny, ten percent regular boring. The book treats Emmy's move to Chicago as the worst thing she ever did, when her mistake was at best that she refused to come back to visit. And it's not like her family or her friends can't leave their town to visit in turn. Or that phones and the internet don't exist. The fact that the town (I will not bother to look up the name again) is such a magnet to all of them that they refuse to leave it even for a day or two borders on dystopian. I was practically begging Emmy to realize that such a dependency on the place you live in is truly nightmarish and that she should save herself while she still could. But no, that's not what Emmy is like. Emmy, instead, is super annoying. "wha, my family is weak and totally fine with that, wha, I built a life for myself that apparently pays me a decent living wage and can comfortably give me a whole month off, wha, I had every fucking chance to get over myself and make peace with my childhood and family situation, wha, I want everything the other families have and more, I wanna be extra special with a cherry on top, wha" I swear to fucking god. And then in the end she basically gets shackled to her hometown forever anyway?? GIRL, GET OUT OF THERE! RUN!! Btw, PSA for all writers out there: Do not, I repeat, do not drop your sequel hook about a third of the way into your first book and then just leave it there, never to be discussed again. (If it wasn't for the sneak peak for the sequel at the end of my copy, I wouldn't even know it was a sequel hook. I would've just called it a forgotten plot curve ball left in here thanks to the utterly bizzarre editing.) I haven't even mentioned yet how the twins are both so inconsequential that they could have easily just been one character; or how Talia is described as wolfish so consistently that I was half-convinced she would turn out to be a werewolf, but this post is already getting long enough. I'm done whingeing now.