Witch & Wizard

Witch & Wizard

James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet

335 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Source: Kroger - on sale!
★★★★☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Okay, I love short chapters as much as the next guy, but these things are two pages each and end and start rather haphazardly.  The novel takes place between two different points of view, of Whit and Wisty, brother and sister, who are, incidentally, also a wizard and witch.  In some cases there are several chapters in one point of view in a row that could easily, and should have been, combined to make one regular length chapter.  Are kids today incapable of reading ten pages in a row?  I just didn't understand the point of such minuscule chapters.

Also, I'm not a fan of "text speak" in novels.  We should be encouraging our youth to remain true to the English language.  I rue the day that this kind of "language" becomes normal.  For example, on page 23: "My parents looked horrified -- but not actually surprised.  So WTH?"  For goodness sakes, spell out "What the hell!"

All that aside, this book had a lot of great things going for it.  It's geared towards younger readers and I can definitely see this book encouraging them to read, but this novel is definitely interesting for adults too and is sure to spark some interesting discussions.  The plot moves swiftly and there's never any boring down time.  It reminded me a lot of The Hunger Games and other "the world as we know it has ended and Big Government is Obese" kind of novels.  Overall, the plot was very interesting with lots of fun twists and turns.

I've never read anything by James Patterson before, and while this was a good book to kill an afternoon/evening with, I'm sure his books for adults must be better.