Check out this full video review.

I'm doing a project where I read all of Schwab's work and try to figure out why her books aren't for me and also if she can write a female character that isn't walking internalized misogyny.

First up, The Near Witch, a book whose biggest crime is being incredibly boring. Reading this made me really aware that a thing about the Schwab books I've read so far is that the beginning is always too slow and it always hampers her pacing for the rest of the book. Here, we open with pages and pages of describing the same things over and over again. It took me months to force my way through this and I only did because I picked it up for a project.

The set up of this was also oddly reminiscent of The Hunger Games. We have the older sister, taught to hunt by her father, taking care of her house after her father died, with a withdrawn and almost useless mother, and a young and innocent little sister.

The main character is lightly not like other girls, but perhaps not as explicitly as I've seen in other Schwab works. The real thing here is that all of the characters are as paper thin as the plot. The romance was shoved in so ham-handedly and truly made no sense to me as anything other than "I guess we do romance now."

The writing was sometimes pretty and sometimes overwrought, creating a patchy experience that made it all the more painful to get through.

Not a great start to this project.