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Bloomz: For Teachers & Schools

Education and Social Networking

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One app for all your parent communication. Bloomz is the FREE award-winning app that saves teachers...

Whatchareadin (174 KP) rated Everything You Want Me to Be in Books

May 10, 2018

Henrietta 'Hattie' Hoffman is starting her senior year in high school. She lives in a small farming town and Minnesota and knows this is not the place for her. She has big hopes and dreams and she will stop at nothing to achieve them, even if it means deceiving others. But when Hattie turns up dead after opening night of Macbeth, there are all kinds of speculations as to why this could have happened and who could have done it. Told from the perspective of Hattie; Dell, the Chief of Police and; Peter the new English teacher. We are taken on a journey from the months leading up to Hattie's death to the months following it. Who killed Hattie and why?

From the very beginning of the book you can see that there is going to be a twist to this case. Everything is not going to be so easily spelled out for you. Just when you think you know who did it, you will find that you are wrong. I was wrong from the beginning. When it got down to the confession part I was jumping for joy because I had nailed the killer, but later I found out it was not so.

This is the first book I have read by Mindy Mejia. If her other books are similar to this, I will be reading them all.

To put it lightly, Hattie is a sociopath. Just at the title suggests she is everything everyone else wants her to be, but no one really knows her at all. She lies to her parents and her friends, being the good student, the good daughter, the loyal girlfriend, but Hattie has secrets. The first thing that shocked me about this book was not that Hattie had an affair with her high school teacher, it was how she laid out her plans to fool the whole town into believing she was the perfect girl next door. No one could have imagined what she had in store in her own mind.

I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a twisty tale.

Kudos

Kara Skinner (332 KP) rated Witches Gone Wicked in Books

Jun 11, 2019

Witches Gone Wicked

Sabrina Doyle | 2018 | Fiction & Poetry, Paranormal, Young Adult (YA)

6.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

All Clarissa wants to do is become a powerful witch, learn about her mother, and find her high school sweetheart, Derrick.

But it’s not that simple when she’s all but banned from using her volatile magic, her mother was apparently an evil dictator, and her high school sweetheart was swept away in a tornado. Oh, and she caused the tornado.

But, now that she’s a teacher at Womby’s School for Wayward Witches, she might have a chance to actually become part of the Witchkin community and achieve her goals.

Despite everyone despising her because of her mother, she’s making new friends like Josie, a video-gaming witch who loves all life, and Khaba, a Djinn with a kilt fetish. She’s also getting attention from the very sexy Julien Thistledown.

If only that jerk Felix Thatch would stop patronizing her and let her learn about her mother.

Witches Gone Wicked is essentially Harry Potter fanfiction,which had me skeptical at first, but it was really entertaining at the same time.

Womby’s is the Title I version of Hogwarts. It’s for witchkin too poor to afford other schools as well as ones who were kicked out of other schools. Clarissa, being an art teacher, feels the strain of this with an annual budget of $20. The previous art teacher apparently had the students make mud pie art because of lack of supplies. I really liked the idea of a Title I Hogwarts and found the entire school and the staff really interesting.

Josie and Khaba are really funny and entertaining. Khaba is a bit of a stereotype, but I didn’t mind it that much. Josie was fantastic. Gotta love someone who loves all life and has the guts to treat spiders like puppies.

My favorite character is perhaps Felix Thatch. He’s very sexy and funny and I love almost every scene including him. He’s definitely not a people person by any stretch, but he has a lot of integrity as a teacher and a person that Clarissa just refuses to see.

Clarissa is actually one of my least favorite characters. Her dislike and suspicion of Thatch is near identical to Harry Potter’s dislike of Snape. The only problem is she’s a full-grown woman!

Clarissa has a tendency to blindly trust everyone nice to her, not thinking for a second that anyone has ulterior motives. And she despises Thatch for being brutally honest with her despite proving time and time again that he has integrity as a person and a teacher.

Felix Thatch does the following:

Trains Clarissa to use her magic (granted, the principal ordered him to)
Emphasizes the importance of people wanting to take advantage of her
Makes students write apology letters to her
Lets one of his students read in his classroom during lunchtime
Expresses concern over said student’s habit of hugging male teachers because someone might try to take advantage of her friendly nature.

Meanwhile, Clarissa thinks Thatch:

is secretly trying to kill her
might be trying to enslave her using sex magic
condones student and teacher relationships
It’s completely insane! Hey, who’s the most likely to take advantage of you? Maybe not the guy who keeps warning you about people taking advantage of you.

Clarissa is sometimes funny and relatable. I like how much she cares about her students and her patience with the troublemakers in her class. That’s actually really admirable.

But half the time she’s juvenile and irrational and I just want to shake some sense into her.

She’s the daughter of a powerful witch who apparently terrorized the Witchkin community with evil and forbidden magic. Clarissa never knew her birth mother personally, but she’s treated with suspicion and fear because her mother killed and ruined the lives of basically everyone.

Because of her lineage and her volatile magic, Clarissa is under constant threat of being fired from Womby’s, drained of her magic, and turned into a Morty (Muggle).

So you think she would be really careful, right?

Lol no.

Clarissa goes around saying she wants to be the most powerful witch ever, uses magic when she’s not supposed to, and makes plans to break into the library’s restricted section. It’s a freaking miracle that she didn’t get drained and turned into a Morty.

Here’s another thing: why doesn’t she want to be drained? I really don’t get it. Because of her magic and her mother:

everyone hates her
her sister died
her high school sweetheart blew away in a tornado
Womby’s almost burned down
anyone can turn her into a sex slave
As far as I can tell, there are very few benefits to her having magic and a staggering amount of drawbacks. Call me a defeatist, but if I was Clarissa I would be begging to be drained. Her conviction that magic is her true identity isn’t good enough for me.

All in all, this book is definitely three out of five stars. I enjoyed the worldbuilding and really like Thatch. Some of the magic concepts are surprisingly sexy, which I definitely enjoyed. I just don’t like Clarissa.