I want to stress that this is definitely a cozy book. What do I mean by that?

I mean you will devour it, almost and perhaps even against your will. Almost. Because you’ll enjoy it. It’s sweet, it’s curl-up-in-a-chair-and-finish-in-one-sitting, it touches different genres in a beautiful and gentle way.

But it also feels a little quickly put together. I couldn’t help but notice all of the grammar and punctuation errors. As I’ve gotten older and my book collection (both physical and mental) has grown, I’ve accepted that some books are just bound to have an error here and there. I can accept that. But honestly the errors throughout were frustrating, some even manifesting as continuity errors (a character completed an action on one page but on the next behaved as if the author had forgotten they’d written that action so does a different action that makes no sense given where they should be physically).

If you look past those errors, it’s a cute story. Really.

Now onto my issues with the plot, so I’m going to add a clear potential SPOILER WARNING here. Everything from here below, skip if you don’t want literally anything spoiled.

I found myself frustrated with this plot and the details of this world that has been built. I’ve written comments in the forum about some of these things already so I won’t beat a dead horse. But I will summarize.

The Black and Whites and the way they change a story did not feel consistent to me at all.

I found myself wishing we were reading the Book Witch Case Files instead of this story. By the end I’d changed my tune a little bit, but still… I wish we were instead getting a series where a book which spends each book dedicated to fixing a book. In fact, this concept came to me before it was revealed in this book and I got excited about writing a series like that myself. So instead of being intrigued when that concept occurred within this book, I as bummed that now I can’t really attempt that. 😂

Adding the book-within-a-book felt cheap to me and like the author just didn’t want to commit to the story being told. I was so invested until that point.

I also felt like this book could have been longer, dare I say ~500 pages. I understand it was meant to be short to pay homage to the short Nancy Drew stories and other mysteries/detective novels. It’s a sweet concept. But truly I found the world and Book Witch concept interesting enough that I wanted more and I wanted it to be a little more serious.

Again, for what it is and how the story and plot manifested, it’s cozy and cute and fine. It teaches the important lessons. But I think if anyone (author, editor) had spent more time on this story (length of plot, quality of edits), it could be a 5 star read for me. So I suppose that’s the only reason it isn’t 5 stars; I still see how this book could be improved and that holds it back for me.w