Enter a wicked cool fantasy world of witches and their assassins, where a group of renegades battle to capture the Heart of the Coven. “A unique, gripping, engaging book by a voice that the genre has been waiting for.” — Seanan McGuire, author of the Wayward Children series Even teenage assassins have dreams. Eli isn’t just a teenage girl — she’s a made-thing the witches created to … just a teenage girl — she’s a made-thing the witches created to hunt down ghosts in the human world. Trained to kill with her seven living blades, Eli is a flawless machine, a deadly assassin. But when an assignment goes wrong, Eli starts to question everything she was taught about both worlds, the Coven, and her tyrannical witch-mother.
Terrified that she’ll be unmade for her mistake, Eli seeks refuge with a group of human and witch renegades. To earn her place, she must prove herself by capturing the Heart of the Coven. With the help of two humans and a girl who smells like the sea, Eli is going to get answers — and earn her freedom.
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Magic is meant to be chaos. Chaos is beautiful!
Meet Eli, a made-thing assassin the witches created to hunt and kill ghosts in the City of Ghosts (Earth). But when two missions went wrong, Eli starts to question her purpose and the Coven.
Unable to return to the City of Eyes, Eli met a group of teenagers led by a witch outcast asking for her help in exchange for her passage home. Their mission: to get the Heart of the Coven.
This book is amazing!!! It’s full of adventures, well-paced, magical, and would stimulate your mind to imagine the setting, the actions of the characters, and the events transpiring. You can feel that the author has put her heart and soul into writing it! I love the main characters and the story itself is very compelling. It is well written, beautiful prose.
Although there are some questions that come to mind after reading this book, I guess I will have the answers in the next book.
I thank the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for allowing me to read and review the eARC of this book. I can’t wait to read The Boi of Feather and Steele.
The beautiful cover caught my eye and then the synopsis was very intriguing as I could almost imagine a Frankenstein type character. Eli is a construct, a thing, a tool and an assassin but Eli is capable of so much more and this is her story. There is without doubt a fairly good representation of LGBTQ+ here but it’s the journey that Eli takes from being proud to just serve to realising that she deserves answers that really pulls the reader along. When sent by the Witch who created her to kill a Ghost in the Human realm everything goes wrong and Eli fears that if it’s discovered she will be unmade. So when yet again an assignment turns out to be a setup Eli discovers that her purpose isn’t quite what she thought it was.
I won’t lie as much as I enjoyed much of this book there are parts that felt confused and it was as if the author was trying too hard to bring metaphysical elements in play. The actual interactions between Eli, Tav and Cam made it feel relevant but when it came to her interacting with the two young Witches that she’s grown up with the prose just got too flowery and I found it difficult to understand why Eli would trust them. The actual explanation as to just why Eli is sent after Ghosts was just too preposterous for me unfortunately and that meant the ending was very unsatisfactory. So in conclusion I can say it has good ideas, I liked the main character but to me it occasionally went off at a tangent that was just too muddled.
This voluntary take is of a copy I requested from Netgalley and my thoughts and comments are honest and I believe fair
The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass should have been a novel that I loved. Instead, it left me feeling hollow and unsatisfied.
The first words I uttered after reading The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass were, “what the heck did I just read?” Anytime I ask myself that question I immediately know how I feel about a novel.
I usually try to stay objective with these reviews, avoiding the use of pronouns such as “I” or “me.” I like being objective, saving my expressive nature for my Podcast and YouTube reviews. However, when a novel has such a negative impact on me, it makes it hard to stay objective.
Insubstantial
Like I said before, this novel left me feeling hollow. Every time I put this novel down, I just stared at it. It felt like I had not absorbed anything, making me realize that there was nothing worth absorbing in this novel. The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass has absolutely no world-building. There is the City of Ghosts and the City of Eyes, except there is no detail surrounding either world. City of Ghosts seems to be our world, and the City of Eyes, well, there is a whole lot of nothing there. It lacks substance; it lacks the detail to ground the reader in the world. The characters jump scenery in a snap, and there is the briefest of detail to garner some attention to the reader, but it does not paint a scene. There is nothing to hold the reader and ground them to the story.
Then there are the characters. Eli had much potential to be compelling, but much like the story, she lacked substance. Her lacking substance is interesting because she is something made, made by witches, her will is not her own, but as a thing, she can be many things. Tav and Cam as well. They lack description as well. At one point, Eli remarks on Cam’s mustache catching me off guard. Immediately I thought, “he has a mustache? Since when?”
Adan does not focus on giving these characters a solid form. They are more like blurry figures, lingering against the backdrop. They also lack chemistry. The dynamics are almost non-existent. The reader sees that they are friends, but the lack of substance does not allow it to be believable.
Final Thoughts
While the novel also lacks substance, it also lacks in pacing. The scenes change in a flash, and the event that sends Eli to the human and witch renegades, it does not fit. The novel feels very disjointed as it moves along. The pacing, in the beginning, moves too quickly and then snatching off. It sporadically picks up pace. However, without any detail, it loses the reader in the irregular pacing.
The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass should have easily been a novel for me to enjoy, but it was not. Ultimately, with a lack of substance and poor pacing, this novel left me feeling hollow and unsatisfied.
Wow. And that’s not even a good wow.
This was a literal hot mess and I don’t even know where to start.
The plot had real potential but it was all over the place and too confusing for me to follow through. The world-building was non-existent, LGBTQA representation was great but there wasn’t much else to rave about, and the writing style wasn’t to my liking. I can literally go on and on but I’m sure you got the gist with all the other low ratings for this novel.
Nevertheless, there is something we can all learn from this: Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Nuff said.
I really wanted to love this book, but unfortunately I just did not. It had potential to be something great – a ‘made’ being, created to be an assassin of ghosts? But there was so much going on, and the story flipped between current and pasts events without a clear break, and I felt confused a lot of the time.
I did enjoy the characters themselves, I just couldn’t get into the story and finished it not feeling a great desire to continue to the series.
“Magic is meant to be chaos. Chaos is beautiful!”
The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass by Adan Jerreat-Poole caught my eye with that simple yet beautiful cover, and reeled me in with the promise of an intriguing Frankenstein’s monster-esqe teenage assassin main character, and the busting down the Coven’s tyrannical reign over the City of Ghosts and the City of Eyes plot line. I feel like this author has a very lyrical writing style mixed with a young vibe. The City of Eyes gave me a Labyrinth type visual in my kind. That scary beautiful sort of aesthetic. Our lead character Eli is sort of on this journey of self discovery. Finding her strength and the power she has even though she was “created” by the witches to be an assassin, she is more, and she can be more. I liked that base layer of her character, but I did find it a bit hard to connect with her and some of the additional characters, and I blame that on the fact that the transitions were a bit choppy and I did feel like I was playing catch up often in this read.
I even mentioned to a friend that I felt like I was reading an extremely detailed poem. It’s beautiful and entrancing. A poem extensive enough that it’s a story, but since it’s labeled a novel it feels like, for me, that it’s missing something. That being said I enjoyed this read overall. Sort of a coming into oneself type of read. I loved that there is LGBTQ+ representation that feels seamless. That the main character has inner doubts that sort of allude to mental illness in some ways. I liked the imagery of the world that was built. I just wish the transitions had all been smoother and I didn’t feel a step behind the entire story.
I definitely plan to check out what’s to come next from this author.