If you would like to read this book without further influence from me, please consider purchasing it here!

So. I'm not going to lie. I tried reading this book in 2024 and DNF'ed it about 40% of the way through. But, there's reason. Two of them, actually.

First off, as I said in the previous self published book I read, I am absolutely begging you guys to please proofread your books and have a trusted friend or family member also beta read your book. I thought The Girl In The Woods was riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, but this one was really bad. Wrong punctuation, missing ones, words improperly capitalized. The main cat's name spelling changed from "Reese" to "Reece" on the same page.

But, the original reason why I had initially DNF'ed this book was for the name of the deity that the big bad was worshiping. Bastet. Yes, Bastet. The same name as the Egyptian Goddess of protection. It feels wildly inappropriate to be using the name of a deity who's symbolism is fertility, childbirth, and protection.

Is that a petty reason to DNF a book? It absolutely is! At the same time, especially given this is a book geared towards younger audiences, I personally feel like just translating the word cat into another language may have been less of an insult. Or even mash names together into something new that sounded feline like.

Now, as I just mentioned, I am wildly out of the demographic for this book. According to Amazon, this book's age range is 12-18 years old. That being said, as somebody who was interested in all that sort of witches and spooky things at that age, I still probably wouldn't have been too interested in this book.

Almost every time a murder happened, the writing eventually glossed over it. The town glossed over it. Like that eventually it was just going to stop on its own. Just given how many happened, something like that would absolutely rock a small town. It doesn't just go away.

But, we seemed far more focused on Danny's day to day life, at least until his very blatant love interest Iris, starts getting weirded out by everything going on. Not even that he gets weirded out. She does. A little over half way through the book, everybody just starts talking with an accent. It's legit just, first they're talking in almost perfect syntax, and then heavy accents. It was extremely jarring to just completely change writing style.

And that's what I mean when I tell people who self publish to proofread and go back to fix things if you change your mind throughout the writing process. It's cool to change your mind, but it can't reflect as somebody's actively reading the book. You have to make sure that your entire book is cohesive and this one, unfortunately, is not.