Review: Pleasantly surprised...solid prequel
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 2, 2012
I got "Not Magic Enough" as a Kindle freebie back in March but forgot about it until recently.  It was a perfect short read for a rainy, lazy Saturday. Set in a medieval fantasy world, the story is self-contained yet works very well as a prequel to the "real" book ("The Coming Storm") by providing a general framework for the Otherlings series and the family background for Ailith (Delae's granddaughter) as well as brief mentions of other characters (such as Elon).The world-building is detailed enough (but not overly complicated) to enable the reader to imagine it, and the various secondary characters are easily relatable (although IMHO, the good vs. bad distinction was a bit too sharply drawn). I liked that the main characters accepted the reality of their relationship and circumstances and simply appreciated what they had, instead of wishing for more.  My only complaint (if it could be called that) is the vagueness at the end about Delae.  The reader can surmise what probably happened but me? I wanted details!  There seems to be a HEA but it's a bittersweet, realistic one for this story.This was my first book by this author and yes, "Not Magic Enough" could have used a bit more editing and "tightening up", as my favorite English teacher used to say.  And yes, the constant POV switches without any warning sometimes gave me mental whiplash.  And yes, there is purple prose *sighs/LOL* but no, it is NOT erotic as that term is used/understood these days.  Nonetheless, I'll probably buy "The Coming Storm" to see what happens with Ailith. Maybe there'll be something that further explains what happened to Delae?  Will Dorovan also make an appearance?[Note about my Kindle file: there were formatting and some punctuation errors so at times, I couldn't tell if some sentences were separated intentionally or by formatting mistake.]NOTE 13-09-2012: rating changed from 3 to 4 stars [Why? To be fair to the author. I finally noticed the tiny balloons that popped up when the cursor rested over each star and realized that Amazon's scale differed from mine.]