Book 69, 2020
An Academy For Witches by D.L. Auberry
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I finally managed to slog through the rest of An Academy for Witches by DL Auberry. It's the first part of the author's "Witch in Progress" series. Main character is Anwen, a young witch embarking on her quest to become more than a 'witch in progress'.
The premise, I believe, is that Anwen is starting her first semester(?) at the academy, where she meets her new roommate, Eudora. She also learns that Harvey, a male witch whom she's been crushing on forever, is in attendance. Anwen strongarms Harvey into going on a date with her, which ends in disaster. She retaliates by using an ointment (I think the author meant 'potion') to turn Harvey to stone. Now fearful that she'll be expelled, Anwen and Eudora, along with Anwen's cat, Apricot, pretend to be mature witches in order to finagle their way into the Osage Orange Forest, which is where they can find a remedy to restore Harvey. Since they aren't meant to be there, they are taken into custody, escape, get taken into custody, escape, lather, rinse, repeat. Along the way, they meet several odd characters, including a young male witch named Brayden, whom Eudora develops a tendre for. They still need to escape the forest, get back to the academy, and restore Harvey.
Did that make any sense? Of course, it didn't! Reading it made no sense. This was the most senseless thing I have ever read in my entire life, and I have read "Firewhisky fic", written by drunk authors for the fun of it. Those were masterpieces compared to this dreck. I can only surmise that the author's first language is not English. That's fine, but have your work translated by someone competent. This seemed like the author ran it through one of those online translation sites and voila! It was like reading a train wreck, and like a train wreck, I couldn't look away. Sentence structure made no sense, certain words weren't actual words (at least not in English), and the plot (what there was of it) just ping-ponged hither and yon in the most absurd fashion possible. It was awful.
♦ His face dragged Anwen over her monotone dreams in her head.
♦ "There must be some insomnious rat scrambling to the ground or a raven crackling upon a tree branch."
♦ "Whoa," she suspired in serious anger.
♦ Clustered as they were, alongside the concern that was fueled mainly by the strange facts that kept making an appearance rather quaintly, they started pondering of the best thing they could do on the few forthcoming moments.
What the actual fuck...?
Favorite line (and hoo, boy, it was a struggle to find one!): "This is awkward." // "What is?" // "You brought your cat on our date."
I just...have no words. It reminded me of the time I decided to immerse myself in a Spanish soap opera. I didn't understand everything that was going on, but I got the gist of it. In this case, however, not only did I not understand what was going on, but there was no gist! I see it had some high ratings, but most of them disclosed that they had received a free advanced copy. I call bullshit!
This was horrible, and it doesn't deserve any stars. It gets one, because that's as low as I can go.