Stephanie

I really enjoyed this book and absolutely fell in love with Marcellus and Tova.

However like many others, Cameron drove me crazy! BUT I think he had a point in the story and his point of view is one that's worth telling that many people don't consider or come in contact with in our daily lives. Cameron in many ways is lucky for the life he gets - he isn't thrown into the foster system but instead placed with an aunt that sacrifices and takes care of him as a member of his family. Even his mother has a story for why she (most likely) abused drugs and what may have led her to them. In reality, our childhood years are our formative years and really define who we are, and even though Cameron gets a lot of care from his aunt, he was still neglected and abandoned by his mother, and that can wreck havoc in someone's development and mental health years and years later, as we see with Cameron.

Really heart warming book in the end and I really felt connected to all of the characters.

Good overall read. It can get a bit repetitive and some time throws out too many numbers for you to really comprehend and remember everything it talks about, but very interesting overall. It can be a hard read as well, because if you're like me, you'll find yourself getting angry at all the ‘subtle' ways sexism and inequality exists and how much if affects women in ways you may not even think about.

Overall I think the book is decent, has interesting magic and an interesting plot line. My only real gripe with the book is that I find it to be repetitive and there's too much monologue in it (a fair amount seeming to be a repeat from something he's already monologued about). While I like learning about the magic and his thoughts, I find the way it's laid out to lack depth.

I think overall it just lacks a bit of focus and is drawn out when it doesn't need to be. I still recommend it if you want a quick read with an interesting magic system but I wouldn't expect top level writing. After the first book though, which I loved, I'm interested to see what the next will be like and will definitely plan on reading it.

Overall I enjoyed the book, however I think the first books pacing and story building was a bit better than this one. I feel that the story didn't go as deeply into the plot as it could have and it felt like the discovery + resolution was rushed near the end.

The character building was good and seeing the relationships bloom between characters was rewarding, however again I think this could have been a little more in depth as I didn't feel that any of the relationships really built up to that much depth or changed much.

I was a bit unsure if I should rate this 2-4 stars. I find the book very repetitive and pretty annoying to read. She sounds a bit condescending throughout it and every chapter says the exact same thing. However I can see the point of being repetitive when you're trying to drill a method into someone.

Her method though I think stands for itself. I've been moving recently and haven't fully organized my house yet (though I have thrown everything out that doesn't bring me joy). I'll have to see how it goes months from now with her method but so far I've found my husband and I are a lot tidier and organized and it's a lot easier to be that way mostly due to ease of putting items away when you know exactly where they go and don't have to look for a spot every time. I definitely recommend her method if not necessarily this book.

I think the idea behind this story is a great one. A young wizard struggles to learn more and his pride causes him to make a huge mistake which he spends a lot of his life trying to fix and coming to terms with. However, the way the story is written seemed a bit bland to me. I didn't feel an arch in the story and when he came face to face with his problem it was very anticlimactic for me. The whole story just seemed a bit monotone to me.

Besides that I do think it has some great messages, it just needed to be more climactic for me.