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Three weeks this took me!! Three weeks of my life I'm never getting back.

This book was Boring, with emphasis on the capital B.

It is a long, long, long book. And nothing happens. You think something is happening, but then you realise that it isn't. This 700-page behemoth is essentially a preview for the sequel.

The story was boring. The background characters were boring. Oxford was boring. Matthew is boring. Diana is particularly boring, perhaps not as a person, but definitely to read about, at great length, for many, many pages of yoga, running, rowing, reading, reading, reading, yoga, wearing leggings, sniffing wine, sniffing things that aren't wine, reading, reading, sniffing Matthew, sniffing Matthew's breath, reading, reading, reading.

For a book about witches, it takes about 500 pages for anything remotely witchy to happen. The rest is a big history lesson with some "very-specific-knowledge-required-to-understand" science thrown in.

Now that I think about it, I have no idea what made me pick this up. Perhaps the headrush of receiving a book voucher for my birthday, combined with it being at eye level on the shelf directly opposite the entrance to the Fantasy section at my local bookshop.

I regret my purchase and I want my three weeks back. I persevered hoping I would be rewarded for my patience, but the pay-off never came. Nothing exciting happens, nothing left me intrigued to know what happens next. The plot that was central at the beginning of the book gets abandoned for another, and another, which are then referenced later on in some desperate bid to hold the story together. By the time I reached the last fifth of the book, I would not have recognised it for the same book I'd picked up 3 weeks prior. I have no idea what the point of this book was supposed to be, or what it was really about. The back cover only references the romance and even that was tenuous at best.

I am desperately looking forward to reading anything that isn't this book.