My Review of Dark Secrets

I swear I didn't mean to pick a witch book the week of Halloween.

 
But I did and it works so, BOO! Also, here's my review of Book 1 and Book 2 of the series. 

In Book 3, we pick up right where we left off in Book 2, after the storm that destroyed the village and nearly destroyed Briley herself. But we also meet a new face - another young witch named Alyssa from another town (more on this later). Alyssa, like Briley, is struggling with her inner darkness, but unlike Briley, does not have anyone to show her the ropes. She ends up running away from home, and into our protagonist, about halfway through the book, and together they continue trying to keep one step ahead of the overly-dramatic Whiteheads and Lord Grey, who are still trying to eradicate witchcraft.

(True story they actually do try)

Writing the third book in a series is hard. Introducing a brand new character in the third book - and having a third of the story from her POV - is even harder. The problem is that we spent two books getting to know Briley and the Baxters, and then we are supposed to form an immediate interest in Alyssa (this is not limited to Avory - Sarah J. Maas did the same damned thing in Heir of Fire, and I had the same gripe there). The series is called the "Briley Witch Chronicles" - which means that the reader expects to see the book through Briley's experience. Trying to make a connection with Alyssa took away from the enjoyment of the book, and although I liked her as a character, I would have preferred a different way of getting acquainted.

Besides that, there's still some series level concerns. As I mentioned in the first two reviews, Briley is supposed to be in her early twenties, but acts like an overgrown woman-child some of the time. She was adopted by the Baxters in the end of the second book (still puzzles me), but the "Mummy" and "Daddy" and "Daughter" felt way too weird for me. For whatever reason, I kept being reminded of Will Ferrell in Step-Brothers:

The sentiment is fantastic, especially considering Briley's character as one searching for a home, but the execution is heavy-handed. The core idea in the book, and the title - Everyone's got Dark Secrets, suffers from that same lack of nuance. The phrase "Even X has secrets" was used three or four times, enough to be noticeable.

That being said, there were a ton of tie-ins to previous books that I didn't even consider to be secrets, which was a lovely surprise. Briley's book, for example, was explored more, and there's a couple of unanswered questions that will carry us over into the fourth book. It was nice to see the continuity threads; sometimes it's hard to tell where the series is going. And with all of the attention on Alyssa in this book, I feel like Briley didn't grow as much as she did in the first two books. I missed her and Smoky as the lead and only protagonists, and it was noticeable towards the end.

Three stars

Buy Dark Secrets (Briley Witch Chronicles Book 3) for Kindle