Review: It's like watching kids do homework.  And the kids aren't even yours.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 1, 2014
Unfortunately, this book started of kind of bland and never really got better.  The main character could have been interesting, but she never really showed any personality.  The villain was the generic power-mad necromancer (seriously, this is the third of fourth book in a row that I've read that use necromancers . . . are they the new sparkly vampires?) who was both nigh-omnipotent and yet hopelessly inept.  The character of "Void" really wasn't explained well.  A couple of the secondary characters (particularly the spoiled princess) had some potential but never quite captured my interest either.  Oh, and why is a magic professor checking his watch?  At one point, the author seemed to remember that everyone was speaking English, threw in a half-hearted explanation ("Well, someone must have cast a translation spell on you at some point."), but it seemed rather arbitrary.But the biggest problem with the book is that you really feel like you're following a student around to her classes and watching her do her homework.  Yep, it's about as exciting as it sounds.  The main character tries to figure out how if the modern world hast patents, does her homework, does other random high-school-esque stuff, none of which is all that exciting.  And I would say that this kind of dull activity takes up at least half of the book.  It felt like the author had a really clear world built in his mind, and then found the most uninteresting way in the world to introduce us to it.  This content should have been condensed and turned into an epilogue, because it just wasn't interesting enough to keep me engaged for a full length novel.