Witches of Vegas

                    

I have a confession to make, I'm a shitty British person. This may come as a shock to everyone I've encountered whilst living in Canada, but I Jessica Howard, a fully-fledged member of the Queen's England, have never seen, or read, Harry Potter. 

I have spent a lot of time in the Harry Potter shop in Kings Cross Station, but that's because I spend half my life there and it's a good place to browse while I'm waiting for the queue to the loo to go down. 

This lack of knowledge reared its head when I began reviewing the latest novel sent to me, The Witches of Vegas by Mark Rosendorf. The novel centers around a family of witches that use their power to perform a magic show in Las Vegas. Struggling to compete with the supernatural, the owner of a neighboring show agrees to spy them for a woman that turns out to have ties with the family. 

The woman who hires them turns out to be a witch herself, as well a vampire. Having been turned by the family's token blood-sucking relative, she seemingly went rogue and was banished by her former lover. 

Quite a straight forward plot you would say, Straddling the line between reality and the supernatural, but pretty easy to follow. 

Oh, how wrong you would be. 

You see, whilst a good book, there is a lot going on within this text. We have reality, we have witches, we have vampires. We have time travel, exorcism, abuse, death, portals, illusions, channeling the earth's energy, and the use of crystals. Quite simply there is far too much going on within the novel. For me, at least, there was little chance of escapism and relaxation given that every 3 pages seemed to lead into a new trope that could have been the focus of a novel in its own right. 

Don't get me wrong, it's a well-written book. The characters are well developed, the description was great and it was fun to read about a topic that I'd never really explored before. Maybe that was the issue, maybe it was owing to the fact that I have little experience reading about the topic that I found it hard to enjoy. Regardless, whilst it may be a good choice for people who enjoy books about magic and the language itself was easy to read, I don't think it's something I will be picking up again. 

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