A Taste of Death and Honey by Sharon Bayliss

The December People, #3
URBAN FANTASY

rating

When Samantha’s parents died, she lost everything. Her home. Her friends. Her hope. Then a life-loving spring witch at the children’s shelter fills her life with light and joy once again.

But like the springtime, Samantha’s happiness doesn’t last forever. Her friend dies violently in front of her, the victim of a mysterious killing spell. Furious and grief-stricken, Samantha resents her own weak spring magic. She doesn’t need life and renewal. She wants revenge…and death.

Homeless and alone, Samantha seeks shelter with her old friends, the Vandergraff family, and finds an unexpected ally in the powerful winter solstice witch, Evangeline. The girls’ anger and eagerness lead them to cast a killing spell before knowing the truth behind Samantha’s friend’s death or the identity of her killer.

Once the spell is cast, they can’t take it back, and they must fight to stop their own curse before it takes away everyone they love.

The December People has an intriguing premise that hooked me into the first two of series. There are witches in the world, born into different seasons that separate them more than they unite them. The series evolves around one troubled winter witch family. The darkness and non-conventional differences with this series previously made it stand out strong.

I hate to say it, but this one didn't hook me like the others. The forced feel with some of the writing caused the flow to suffer.

The author's blunt writing style serves its purpose when the going is good, but when it's hard to stay caught up in the plot when it instead comes across too simple. It took me awhile to figure out why I couldn't get glued in on this story as I did with the others; eventually I figured it was because the book was all over the place.

Secondary characters get plenty of page screen viewpoint, but so do the new and old. I've found that when you're doing frequent head hopping, you have to be careful not to make it distance the reader from the story to where they fall out of it completely. That's what happened here. When I started caring about one perspective, it shifted before I bonded. Eventually I cared little whose viewpoint was whose and what was going on. An unfortunate side effect of missing a step when frequently shifting third person POV.

There's a fourth planned to wrap everything up, so I'm hoping that one endears me as well as the others did.


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