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Dannie won the contest I had to review a copy of Cursed by Suzanne Sabol. Here is her review:
Very rarely do I come across a novel that I can't finish, and it is rarer still that I would give such a novel anything higher then a three out of ten. But here we are.
We open with Hannah, being goaded into something or another by the smexy Damien, accompanied by overusage of adjectives and adverbs (a la Twilight). Someone needs her, see, but she needs Damien and damnit he needs her! and she is "torn between duty and love" (a phrase which is just awkward if used anywhere but the official summary of a novel or the Underworld synopsis) and all this is stated quite clearly within two pages (actually, one and a half). You can see right away that the prose and dialogue is clumsy, but I press on.
Flashback some hundred years later (I think), with an old women banished from her native London and forced into midwifery in the young Americas. She is assisting with the ailing birth of a child with a strange mark. As the mother dies, Merideth informs Henry (the father) that she bears the witch's mark and she must be hid! she is a danger! her name is--Hannah!
Woah, okay. So now shes a child bringing home black cats to her wary father, who despite her witchyness admittidly loves her more then her much less witchy sister Martha and there's a vague feeling that Hannah is irrevocably being spoiled despite the fact that GUYS SHE'S A WITCH! I'm just kind of reeling at the thought that, if this really is early America, wouldn't everyone be up-in-arms about this? Even if it is her father, wouldn't she be thrown into a fire pit or something? Wouldn't Merideth the Midwife called for the nearest lynchers? Even if we could ignore all the fear and death that surrouned witches at the time period, even if I'm to believe Hannah was really hid and protected after her birth, I know she wouldn't have been favored over her signifigantly normal sister. This is so inaccurate with the time period I just kind of want to hit something.
I drudge my way forward several dozen pages, and the lines of time period become so blurred I can't even put a pinpoint on the century anymore. Is it early America, or is it fifties farmlife? Is it NY in the partay? What's happening? My head shouldn't be hurting! Goddamn! Even this wouldn't be a real issue if the writing was rewarding in its own sense, but at its best it comes across like information from a textbook on wicca or something, at its worst just the gratuitous ramblings of an English professor trying to break into the creative novelizations. And this, readers, is why, at page 102, as someones talking to a Reverand and I have stared longingly at my brand-spankin-new copy of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for half an hour, I put Cursed down, and I do not pick it back up.
But the thing is...I can't give it a horrible review. I can't say it made my eyes bleed, or notably ridiculous, or one of the worst books ever written. Because it wasn't. It's main fault was that it wasn't notable at all. There's nothing that made it stand out from all the other boring/romantic witch stories out there. I couldn't finish it because the story and the characters were just watered down version of far superior offerings from far superior writers, and it was just painful at times. But it wasn't horrible. It was just there, bland and boring and awkward and not interesting enough to even be a zero out of ten.
Rating: 5 out of 10
DAYUM!
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