Bewitched Souls started off interestingly enough, dropping
the reader into a night filled with witches and demons. While it was good to
see a story kick off with action, it did feel a little bit more like I was
being told a story rather than watching it unfold. It was a little jarring at
first, though the writer has a smoothly flowing style that does make reading
easy.
I had a hard time getting a sense of who each of the
characters was as an individual, aside from their dialogue, they all seemed to
be interchangeable, especially Talis, Cian and Teryn. They all seemed to move
the same, think the same, act the same, and respond the same to situations,
which is a shame, because it would have added a greater dynamic to the story to
see them all behaving differently.
I found the whole thing with Dion and Kolby to be very
cliché and very unbelievable. There is obsession, but never at any point does
the reader learn just what it is about Dion that make her so hell bent on
having him and no other. I also found it very difficult to believe just how
quickly Talis forgave Dion and jumped into a relationship with him after the
way their friendship fell apart. The lack of a slow build made me wonder about
the ages of the characters, because that struck me as very teenage like
behavior to me and yet, Talis is supposed to be the head of a coven, which is a
very, very serious responsibility.
I must say that the author seemed to have a decent overview of
the aspects of witchcraft, which shows that some good research was done to make
the moments in the book where characters used rituals and spells. There was a
ton of prep in dressing for a scene that went by fairly quickly and never
showed any need for all of that attention to detail to have been made.
Some of the Point of View changes were a little jarring and
I had to go back and see exactly who was saying what as we would be in Talis’
head on line and the very next line be in Dion’s. One question I kept asking
myself was that if most of the people there were witches, then why didn’t they
go to the other witches for help and why, then, was their coven so small if
there were so many other witches around, it simply kept pulling me out of the
story each time someone was unsure of whether they were going to be able to
handle a problem or not, and then did not go to someone else around them for
aid.
Fight, exhaustion, return to bedroom, talk, sex, was a
pattern that started to get a bit repetitive, the battle scenes started to
blend together, making them lose their weight and importance. About midway
through the book the conversations really got repetitive, especially between
Dion and Talis in regards to Dion’s not being able to defend himself against
demons.
At one point it is implied that several months had passed
since they’d gotten together but in reading to that point, there was never any
indication before that of months having passed by, it reads like days to me.
There was a great deal to like about this book,
unfortunately, there was also a lot of things that got in the way of it coming
through clearly. Two dancing hamsters is the highest score I can give this book, since it would be really, really rude to cut a hamster in half.
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