Hello friends, happy Monday! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m posting my review of Liselle Sambury’s novel, Blood Like Magic.

Blood Like Magic by: Liselle Sambury: Voya Thomas has been waiting for her Calling day for years. Now, it is her turn to be given a task from her ancestors in order to pass and claim her witch powers. No one has failed, not for a long time, but when Voya is given the horrific task of killing her first love, failure is all she feels. Destined to find love before the allotted time runs out, the pressure is on, because if she fails, her whole family will lose their magic. This novel had a lot of heart and magic. The world building was really expansive and the author did a good job of explaining how it all worked. There were moments here and there where the reader was a little confused because there were many different plot points intersecting, but in the end everything came together well. This novel was set in the not so distant future and took place in Toronto, which for this reader was exciting to read a book where they got all the place references. The technologies all sounded really cool, and they were described with enough detail that left enough up the imagination. The plot was interesting and well executed; there were parts that the reader didn’t completely understand, mostly with all the sacrificing that had to happen and the choices the main character was forced to make, but it did make for a good lesson that some decisions in life are going to be harder than others. The romance sub-plot, felt forced; in the beginning, the reader believes it was supposed to feel that way for the sake of the main plot, but as the story progressed, it just continued to feel unbelievable. The reader liked how focused this was on family and platonic relationships over romantic ones. They liked that this made the main character question what type of love your first love could be, that was well done. What lacked was the pacing; it was slow going, even with so much happening, the reader just felt like this book kept spinning its wheels when it came to progression. It took pages for things to either happen or move in any sort of direction. The characters were, for the most part, well developed. The main characters had depth and personality, but as more and more characters joined the cast, and there were quite a few of them, they started to lose depth and they became very one dimensional and lacked substance. The fact that there were so many of them felt like they got jumbled up in the different plots, which left the reader a little confused at times. That aside, in the end, this was still an enjoyable read. The reader is curious to see where the story is going to go now that the main character knows more and she’s grown into a stronger person that we can’t wait to see her use her new-found gifts.