Birthspell

So, this book had so much potential, but seems to not have any work put into it. I guess now that you can write and self-publish a book so easily, everyone tries their hand at it. Some do wonderfully, and others fall flat on their face.

The introduction into this book was what had made me want to read more:

"Her fate was to unravel for a purpose. She was born with the mark of the stone. It was inevitable she would face the ensuing battle."

This one was a mess from chapter one to four, which is all I got through before giving up. Its not that there wasn't something possibly interesting that could potentially happen at some point, but rather the lack of grammar, punctuation, character building and sentence structure. When an author uses big words just for the sake of sounding more mature, and not because the word makes sense in the structure, the entire thing falls flat.

Crystalla, or Crystal as she prefers to be known, is an orphan - with a diamond-shaped birthmark on her chest. Given that I just read 'The Atlantis Bloodline', another Indie Author publication, and loved every minute - there is potential to have a wonderful career crafting stories, but this one did not have it.

From one chapter to the next there seems to be a complete disconnect, as if the chapters aren't supposed to follow the next, or some sections were left out for some unknown reason. This made the plot even more difficult to keep track of. One minute Crystal is meeting a stranger while out walking the family property, next she is eating dinner with family members she has not met, then she plays chess with one of the members - follow that up with the attic visit, and a box that wasn't there before, and you can see why I couldn't keep up. There is also no apparent reason for these ideas, apart from filling the page, in my opinion.

Mostly, I was left more and more confused the longer I read this book. Sometimes I can excuse a self-published novel if it had a great plot or interesting characters, but this book was just all around a confusing headache. I really hope the author will keep working on this, because I can see some potential in this novel.