Review: The Witch's Tears

The Witch's Tears
Rating: 3/5 
Buy or Borrow: Buy 
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher. 

Can true love's kiss break your heart...? The spellbinding sequel to THE WITCH'S KISS by authors and sisters, Katharine and Elizabeth Corr. It's not easy being a teenage witch. Just ask Merry. She's drowning in textbooks and rules set by the coven; drowning in heartbreak after the loss of Jack. But Merry's not the only one whose fairy tale is over. Big brother Leo is falling apart and everything Merry does seems to push him further to the brink. And everything that happens to Leo makes her ache for revenge. So when strangers offering friendship show them a different path they'd be mad not to take it...Some rules were made to be broken, right? The darkly magical sequel to THE WITCH'S KISS burns wickedly bright.

While the first book in the series didn't completely blow me away, and it had it's problems for me...I was curious enough about what would happen next to want to pick up this sequel, plus the first book had the flashbacks to the past which provided a nice source of intrigue. This instalment however...I found myself enjoying much less and there was no intriguing historical element to save it. 

In Witch's Tears we're 3 months on from the end of the first book and Merry and Leo are dealing with everything that happened and aren't having a great time. Merry's struggling with the covens rules and her grandmother, she feels lonely and very alone as she's arguing with Leo all the time. Leo is struggling to deal with his loss from the first book and feels somewhat inferior to Merry I think. They'er arguing and not at all being there for each other which was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the book for me. 

The thing I really liked about the first book was the relationship Merry and Leo had, how they where there for each other and helped each other. I loved it and it was a rare thing to see in a book. You usually see the kind of sibling relationship that we see in this book. So I was hugely disappointed. Their arguments where repetitive they argued about and did the same things over and over and over to the point I was rolling my eyes more than once. 

Merry was such a whiny, arrogant little cow in this book, and she seemed to have some sort of complex where she thought she was superior to everyone else because she was more powerful and didn't think she needed to do everything the covens way, and there was this whole conflict she was having with the coven that was just so juvenile and I got really bored of it really fast. The coven...the arguments with Leo...it was all the same repetitive things over and over again and I got so frustrated with it all. Merry and her inner monologue became very, very hard to read. 

We get two new characters, Ronan and Finn. Both are wizards. Both are untrustworthy. Both I wanted to trust and both I didn't feel I could. The thing was, was that Ronan was so overly suspicious that it wasn't even a surprise when he turned out to be the bad guy. Like I knew it was coming. Same as the foreshadowing made it pretty obvious what was coming too. I reached the big reveal and I just...I was like "really?". 

Our other new character Finn seemed to be there solely to be Merry's new love interest. I think we could have got by okay with this book, without him to be honest. I don't know if I couldn't get in to the romance because Merry bugged me or because it was genuinely unnecessary but I feel like it was just thrown in there because we had to have some romance. Like couldn't Leo's romance have been enough? Poor old Leo had to have the bad romance while Merry got to have the good. And then the end happened and Finn's true purpose was revealed. To provide one point on the love triangle that will be present in book three. 

For most of the book not much happens at all except for Merry's whining and her arguing with Leo. I just...I'm not sure what to make of this series. I so badly wanted this book to be better than the first, maybe part of the problem was that I had some high expectations for it, that it would go above and beyond the first book. Instead I found the book a disappointment and more than a little bit boring. 

My problem is that, I am still curious about how it's all going to end in the next book. I assume it all ends in the next book anyway. The ending was enough to pique my interest. I'd like to have some questions answered, including questions that I still have from the first book that I was expecting to be answered in this book, but weren't. Part of me basically wants to see how it's all going to end, but part of me feels like I'm going to be disappointed and that the love triangle that's quite obvious is going to bug me. I like a good love triangle if it's done well, but I feel like I have a good idea of how it's going to go. In short...I don't know whether or not I'll read book three, but book two was a disappointment. 


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