I am Henrietta Howel.
The first female sorcerer in hundreds of years.
The prophesied one.
Or am I?

Henrietta Howel can burst into flames.

Forced to reveal her power to save a friend, she's shocked when instead of being executed, she's invited to train as one of Her Majesty's royal sorcerers.

Thrust into the glamour of Victorian London, Henrietta is declared the chosen one, the girl who will defeat the Ancients, bloodthirsty demons terrorizing humanity. She also meets her fellow sorcerer trainees, handsome young men eager to test her power and her heart. One will challenge her. One will fight for her. One will betray her.

But Henrietta Howel is not the chosen one.

As she plays a dangerous game of deception, she discovers that the sorcerers have their own secrets to protect. With battle looming, what does it mean to not be the one? And how much will she risk to save the city—and the one she loves?

Well this was disappointing in several ways. I’d had some people tell me that this book was amazing and I’ve been meaning to read it for the longest while, but just kept putting it off.

Admittedly, every time—prior to this time—I did manage to read a small, small portion of it. I always got to chapter 3 and stopped and it was because of the writing. It wasn’t bad… but it wasn’t good, either.

I know it’s a debut and all but the writing bugged me throughout the whole book. It just wasn’t engaging enough, and it seemed awkward and clunky most times. It was embarrassing, if I’m honest.

Going off this, it made most of the characters bad. I’ll get to the main character in a moment but right now: side characters. There were quite a lot of them and they all just… They all faded into the background to me. No one stood out or felt authentic. They were all two dimensional and so dull.

Now, for main character, Henrietta. I wanted to, especially with the whole I’m-not-the-chosen-one thing going on, but she was just so boring, so annoying, and had a habit of running away from situations that went awry. It happened several times and I was unimpressed every single time.

I wanted to sympathise with her, or at the very least, like her, but it was just hard. I couldn’t make sense of some of the decisions she made and it just made the book a whole lot more embarrassing.

The second time I wanted to start this, I was worried about a potential love shape. The synopsis sure as hell didn’t help, with the mention of three guys and all. Fortunately, it’s not a quadrilateral love shape. Unfortunately, there’s definitely one of triangular sorts. Magnus was a flirt and okay and all, but honestly, he made such a jerk move! And I never liked Rook, Henrietta’s childhood best friend, who’s, frankly, hardly in the damn book other than to cause some kinda monster problem. There was another guy, Blackwood or something? In any case, he ends up being a friend to Henrietta so I guess I’ll take silver linings.

Overall, this was a huge disappointment. I’ll probably read the second book but I won’t be in any rush for it. 2 stars.

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{ about the author }

Jessica Cluess is a writer, a graduate of Northwestern University, and an unapologetic nerd. After college, she moved to Los Angeles, where she served coffee to the rich and famous while working on her first novel. When she’s not writing books, she’s an instructor at Writopia Lab, helping kids and teens tell their own stories.

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