Title: Miss Mabel’s School for Girls
Author: Katie Cross
Pages: 316
Genre: Fiction, YA
Source: Free eBook from NetGalley
Rating: B
Note: As stated under the Source (above), I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review (and trust me, honest is always what you’ll get).
Summary: Bianca is a teenage witch and a new student at Miss Mabel’s School for Girls. Unlike the other students, she is there not to learn anything, but to try to change the fate of her family, as well as her own. To have any chance at success, she must work with an evil witch, the only one who can save the women in her family, and she’ll face terrible choices, never knowing for certain what the outcome will be.
Review: YA and witches are both right up my alley, and I’m a fool for a quasi-gothic cover, so I was pretty excited to be able to get a galley to review. That said, if I was the kind of person who gave up on a book based on the first few chapters, I would never have finished this book. Not because the story was lacking, but because the writing was rough for me. Overly heavy on detail and lacking in story.
Fortunately (for me!), I am the kind of reader who rarely walks away from a book. After the first few chapters, the writer seemed to get into a groove and the story started to take hold of me. There are quite a few twists in the story that I didn’t anticipate, and as the story grew, so did my connection to it. I like stories about strong girls fighting for what’s right, and this book is definitely that.
This is the first book in The Network series, and things were just starting to get heated when this installment wrapped up. I will absolutely be reading the next in the series – Antebellum Awakening – at some point down the road.