What I drank: Right now I’m drinking a weird cider that I bought from the bougie brew shop around the corner.  Unfortunately, it’s  super sour (which I did NOT expect) but I’m drinking it anyway.

Non-Spoiler Summary:  This book is about our main character Evie, and her best friend Aveda Jupiter.  Now Aveda Jupiter is a bonafide superhero fighting the demons as they come through the portals that randomly appear around the city.  There’s some setup with people in the city; a scientist, a trainer, a blogger, the guy who runs their famous bar, etc.  Then Aveda Jupiter gets injured and she can’t go on fighting crime, but more importantly in her eyes, she can’t continue with her public appearances.

Except her friend Evie can fill in for her (with the help of some magic spells), except that Evie’s own superpower might get in the way.

Non-Spoiler thoughts:  This book was pretty freaking cute.  It was however, NOT, and I repeat NOT, a ya book, which I had kind of assumed that it would be.  There were some pretty obvious twists and turns, which I’ll cover later.

Plot:  Like I said there were some pretty obvious plot points as far as Evie’s relationship with a few of the other characters.  This book was not necessarily a work of art, it likes some of it’s tropes, it hits all the beats you would expect, and has it’s obvious moments, but it’s a damn fun read.

Characters: This was one of those books where a character was introduced and you could, in your head, hear a bell go off with teh words “insert love interest here” or “and this is the bad guy.”  At times I felt like some of the characterizations were a little inconsistent.  Evie’s younger sister especially had some of those moment, like I recognize that a teen character is being written, but some of the ‘mood swings’ were a little beyond what I think was necessary, except the plot needed it…  That being said, I enjoyed Evie’s growth in the three biggest relationships in her life.  I thought some of the drama between her and Aveda Jupiter was a little ridiculous and/or overblown, but it all made for fun reading so I’d be willing to overlook it.

Writing Style:  As always I might not be the best judge of character here.  It kind of read like candy, if that makes sense.  I breezed through it (I read it for a readathon and it maybe took four hours with breaks to read a book for a book club that I had to get through).  As I said before, it’s not art, it’s written in a very straightforward manner with an inconsistent narrator who tends to miss a lot of what was going on around her.

SPOILERS – PLEASE SKIP IF YOU’RE GOING TO READ ETC:

I was vague enough in the non-spoilered review so maybe this won’t seem as bad?  I figured early on that the journalist who kept being a pest was going to be the big bad, but about halfway through it starts to become clear that the ‘sidekick’ was the big bad, which I guess mirrors Evie’s dynamic with Aveda, and Evie coming into her own?  The thing that irritated me most in the book was how Evie’s sister was handled.  She appeared to fly off the handle, and none of the adults in her life seemed to care that she wasn’t attending school, and frankly her reason for being at the big firhg at the end felt incredilby disingenuous to me.  The girl might have been a little bit mood-swingy but going to the bad side (which she knew was the bad side) just felt poorly written.    That being said, I did enjoy the way that Evie started to take more agency in her relationships; friends, family, and romantic alike.  I felt like some of the arcs aren’t stories that always get told?

****************END SPOILERS!!!!!*******************

Rating:  I’d give this one a 3.5/5 Stars.  It was a solid book, and super fun read, and I’m definitely planning on reading the next book in the series.   That being said, this book had a few issues where characterization was concerned, where people acted certain ways only to get the plot where it needed to go…

Drink Pairing: This needs to be a drink with some kind of candy to it.  Like a strawberry cosmopolitan, the kind that has enough sugar in it that it tastes like a jolly rancher.  The kind of drink that can pretend it’s for adults while it really has enough sugar to melt your teeth.

Happy Drinking, and until next time,

Ginny