A Witch in Time

A Witch in Time by Madelyn Alt sounded cute and quirky from the flap copy (you know, that little synopsis on the inside of the front cover?), so I picked up from the library and brought it home, along with three other books.

The book lived up to my expectations . . . sort of. I didn't really gel with the beginning, feeling it was a witchy-version rip-off of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire novels, but the middle seemed to come together better before unraveling again in the last few chapters.

Maybe its my personal pet peeve about "mystery" books with mysteries so easy to solve it's like watching an episode of Scooby Doo (just wait for the supposedly least likely or capable suspect to show up, and there you've got your criminal), or maybe I can't get passed a heroine who is a). semi-psychic, and b). practically attatched at the hip to other degrees of psychics not to figure things out before I did, especially since the book is from her point-of-view. It felt like Alt kept dumbing down her narrator just to drag out the page-count. Or, it could be I'm miffed there wasn't more hot guy action. That's also possible. Probably, though, all of the above.

One thing I definitely DID NOT dig was where my personal library shelved this book; in Teen fiction. Granted, I have no way of knowing if my library made a individual mistake, or if the book is being targeted to teens and higher, but I really hope it's not the latter. I promise, I'm not being a prude about teens and sex, but I believe if a book is going to deal with teens and sex, it has a responsibility to show both sides of what happens afterwards, and this novel did not do that. The mentions of sex (which were many) had more to do with raging adult hormones had a flippant, no-consequences thing to them, which I think is misleading to anyone, but particularly to teens who are just figuring out for themselves what they feel and believe about love and lust, and that place in between the two.

So, here's the short version: if you don't mind a bit of a wandering narrative and want something fluffy (including the supposed mystery), this is a good book. Think 'beach read' or something to pick up at the end of a long day of fixing fallout from other people's crap. If you want something meatier, something you have to put a little gray matter into, skip this one for a while.

And with this review, I'm instituting a new rating system: MISH! has her stars, but I'm a little more black and white. My three categories will be these: Buy, Borrow, or Bypass. The first is a book I'd rec friends to drop money on, to add to their own library because I believe they'd might reread it several times. Borrow, for those books that are good, and perfectly enjoyable, but probably wouldn't get more than one or two rereads, or be picked up for a special craving. Bypass, obviously means just don't bother, this book would just annoy you to even attempt, and who needs that?

A Witch in Time, by the skin of it's cover, gets a Borrow, mainly due to it being a part of a series, of which other titles could be better.