Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately it’s not for me. Did not finish @ 15%

This struck me as a well intentioned effort, but neither the plotting nor the execution were particularly distinguished or engaging. The tone varied considerably from page to page, action was often hard to follow, and the characters were not especially distinct from those encountered in other similar books.

This book was an amazing magical adventure filled with all sorts of creatures and loveable, hilarious characters. I loved it! S.A. Larsen is becoming one of my new favorite authors!

I enjoyed this as an adult! A captivating story that held my interest on every page,. An excellent story I enjoyed immensely

Fun ride of a story! These are my favorites; ones with lots of supernatural critters, magic, and kids. I loved the the first two Harry Potter books, Inkheart, Magick, Miss Peregrine, and so many others! It's frustrating being a kid, especially staring at 10 or 11 for most of us. Everything is hurry up and wait! Grown ups are sooo frustrating! I am sure this book will have found it's audience pretty quickly in the 10-13 year old age group by now! It's that good!

For those fans of Norse mythology, this is a great read. Those not familiar with Norse mythology will still enjoy this book. The story moves along quickly and the next thing you know it’s the end of the book. It seemed a little open-ended, so I'm hoping there are more books to follow.

In this lively middle-grade fantasy, Ebony Charmed thinks she is defective, and that all the other kids at her special middle school for mages have great powers but her.

Yet she is able to speak by sign language to some spirits in the local graveyard, and weird things keep happening to her. She thinks she’s at fault, especially as her parents have separated.

The only person who listens to her is her best bud Fleishman, but he doesn’t believe in magic. Until magic sweeps them both into a succession of scary situations.

The first half had a lot of promise, but was frustrating because the adults in Ebony’s life wouldn’t tell her what was going on for her own good, meanwhile she never did what she was told, so she kept running into more and more danger.

The magical forces around her wouldn’t answer her questions either, just repeated that she would know what to do when the time came. This made for frustrating reading, and it didn’t help that the book was rife with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, or that there was a lot of bigotry about fat people in the handling of the Headmistress, called Bat-Face by the kids.

In spite of all the language errors, the second half picked up in pacing, becoming one long action sequence. It didn’t always make sense, but it was full of scary figures and imaginative magic as Ebony meets famous figures from Norse mythology.

Altogether a fun read for kids; I suspect that middle-grade readers would go right along with Ebony being constantly told to behave, and to wait, and she’d understand later, and the adults making little sense. Middle grade life can sometimes seem like that in the real world.

The book comes to a partial resolution, leaving plenty of threads dangling for further adventures.

I'd hoped I would like this book since there was Norse mythology in it but... Nope, not at all. All the time reading it I tried getting into the story but I just couldn't. I didn't care about the characters, it felt really like a typical story you've read again and again. There wasn't any kind of surprise or twist and I wish I could have liked this book because it really seemed interesting but I was bored the entire book.