Hex Education -- Emily Gould & Zareen Jaffery

From Hex Education:

I'm Sophie Stone, Spooky and Summer's fourteen-year-old daughter.  If you've been following Spooky's career, you're probably thinking, Oh yeah!  The baby in the spider-print onesie that Summer brought to the premiere of Shriek 3.  You probably figure that I grew up goth, with dyed-black, Morticia-center-parted hair like my mother's, and that I'm ready to step into my father's signature Doc Martens and direct my first gore-filled featurette any day now.

You'd be wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong wrong wrong.

The last thing Sophie wants is to leave California and move to her father's occult-obsessed hometown of Mythic, Massachusetts.  Mythic has a history similar to Salem, but with a legend along these lines:  Every forty years, a new coven is born.  They alone will be able to protect the town from the Great Evil who is also born every forty years.

Sophie's having none of it.  She thinks the place is lame.  Lameity lame lame, right down to every last Ye Olde sign.   She'd be happy if no one ever talked to her about magic/horror movies/the occult/the supernatural again.

Of course, she's totally fooling herself.  Magic is real, and she is magic.

It had its moments, both clever:

Oh, great.  She thinks I'm some sort of kyndred spyryt, no doubt.

and clunky:

A dark cloud momentarily covers the sun, casting the entire school in eerie gloomy [wait for it... wait for it...] darkness.

Overall: Fun, readable and pretty forgettable.  Try it on fans of the Sweep series and the Stolarz color series (though HexEd is considerably lighter), and there's enough high school drama that I'd try it on Clique fans, too.  It felt to me like the first in a series, but I haven't found any info about a sequel.

Oh:  It should be noted that this was the book my sister stole from me while I was in the shower. 

Her response?  "Wait.  It took TWO PEOPLE to write this?!?"

Comments

[Gwen]

Ha, your sister's comment is dead on. I had high hopes for this, given that I've liked Emily's various blogs for years, and her BFF is Bennett "Lulu Dark" Madison. But it was just too short and too light, to the point that it makes the Gossip Girl books seem rather weighty by comparison.