Plot: 4/5

This year, I've been on the lookout for fantasy books that don't follow traditional epic fantasy conventions. No big quests to defeat a world-ending villain. So I was really excited to see a modern fantasy romance book come up as a recommendation for this category. I can count the number of romance books I've read on one hand, which made this book an exciting change for me. Vivienne is a college student studying witchcraft with her aunt and cousin. After her summer fling breaks her heart, she drunkenly curses her ex. Ten years later, Vivienne's ex reappears in her hometown to renew the ley lines that power her family's magic. It turns out that the joking curse she cast on him was a real curse, and now the entire town is going haywire. Vivienne and her ex have to fix the town's magic and resolved their messy feelings for each other. 

This book was very fun. I loved the lighthearted, everyday approach to witches and magic. The characters were memorable and easy to like. My biggest complaint was that there was a lot of lust in this book. I know that it's a romance, but the main characters probably devoted 75% of their mental energy to thinking about how hot the other one was. It was cute/funny at first, but got old after a while. Even people who are in the honeymoon stage of a relationship don't think about each other that much! 

This book was really really great. Like fantastic and exactly what I was looking for when I set out to read it. Sort of a realistic-fantasy type of deal, where it takes place in the real world but has fictional concepts that are preestablished. Really fun read, with a pretty pretty good ending, not fantastic but still great. The middle half of the book was absolutely a blast and I loved it a whole lot. Minus .5 stars for extremely gratuitous animal violence. Why was there so much animal carnage. Felt unnecessary and not fun. But I did really love this book otherwise.

This book was written by a man whose blog says he's fostered a bunch of dogs, but who I can only infer never learned to trim their nails and also seems to think lions are more interesting, because they're epic or whatever. Also, the racism is WILDLY out of line and VERY OBVIOUSLY comes from the author's entirely unexamined history of personal mass media consumption. The hyperviolent rapist is a man who wears a tutu for most of the book, because haha, get it, he's ~not human~ and doesn't understand which clothes go with which gender, lol? Oh, also, it's dropped halfway through the book in a throwaway line that he's black. Also the tutu came from the childhood bedroom closet of a gay man, I guess? I wish this dude didn't know what gay people were. I also wish he didn't know what dogs were, to be perfectly honest with you.

Listen to me. The pacing is awful. Scenes that don't matter are explained in excruciating detail and the lore is nothing but a series of vague gestures towards the CONCEPT of real-life mythological systems. The main character is bait-and-switched from the Woman Who Might Be Losing Her Humanity the blurb tells you about to the author's epic quipping self-insert everyman, who has the same conversation with rando after rando about how HE KNOWS, RIGHT, what's happening is REALLY weird but he has a gun and will shoot them if they don't help him fail to advance the plot. This is a book written by a middle-aged man who has seen a lot of movies and reads Neil Gaiman sometimes. Whoever edited it didn't do shit, because it barely hangs together as a coherent narrative at all. Instead it reads like the idle dark fantasy of a guy who had some free time to write one book, one time. It's a story that uses sexual assault and graphic descriptions of violence to ask the reader "wouldn't it be fucked up if" and it doesn't even have the decency to do it in a way that's well-written enough to be cathartic. It's not even that weird. It's, like, an intensely boring person's idea of what a weird book is probably like, they think.

Mount Char is nothing. It's a desperately sad waste of my ears and brain cells. It's fodder for my lifelong vendetta against Artists Who Are Just Some Guy. It's "John Dies at the End" for assholes. Whoever wrote the blurb for it is some kind of chaos genius and I hope they were paid accordingly, because if you'd asked me to describe this novel concisely, in a way that might trick people with brains into taking a chance on it, I would have simply said "no, thank you".

Fuck this book.

Too dark for me: animal murder, violent man abuses other characters.