Sorceress

Overview
The conclusion to the trilogy following the young witch Nadia as she attempts to stop the apocalypse kicking off in her little town.

A good story with characters I wish we'd spent more time with. Let down by too many scenes of the evil witch doing evil-witchy stuff resulting in the the story dragging on.

To be honest I only hung around to see Varlaine get her happy-ever-after.

Mild spoilers ahead - it's the last book

My feelings average out at 3 stars, though I have mixed feelings about this series, all of which are heightened in this last volume. I'll try to break it down:

The Good
I really liked the characters. I especially liked Verlaine and her Dads. I thought that Nadia's Persian background was a nice twist and Mateo was an interesting person thrust into a fascinating position. Even the Guidance Counselor turned out to be a relatable person with a very interesting backstory.

When “Team Not-Evil” were together the writing really drew me in. The characters bounced off each other so well that I just wanted to see them all through the crisis. I really appreciated the extra few pages at the end that saw the characters grow in a non-world-ending situation.

The Bad
The characters all were very interesting. It's a shame that time wasn't spent getting to know them better. Nadia felt like a very flat character to me. She was from a Persian background rather unusual for a main character in English language books. It's a shame that this aspect was only mentioned in a few throw away passages. I would have loved to see traces of this in the terminology and traditions of the Craft, handed down from her mother's family. At a bare minimum, this girl who is supposed to love cooking could have brewed up some aush to warm them up after the flood, or munched on some tahdig or lavashak to cheer herself up.

OK, full disclosure - I love Persian food.

The Ugly
Elizabeth was nasty. Really nasty. In fact we had to be reminded in detail every few pages, at length, how really, really super dooper mega reallyNASTY she was.

The Elizabeth-does-something-horific-and-gloats cut scenes got somewhat annoying and off-putting after a while. I'd just be getting into a scene of Varlaine coming up with a plan or talking things over with her Dads when we had to skip to Elizabeth being evil and sticking her fingers into some bird/person to feel their internal organs.

I think the word is gratuitous. Though by the end of the third book it's just boring.

Once her nastiness was established in book 1 we really could have dispensed with pretty much all of the Elizabeth scenes, this would have resulted in a much faster paced story and left room for more character development of Team Not-Evil.