'The Life and Times of a Superfly Witch'

★

Where To Start With This One?

First, mechanically, it needs so much work as to be painful. 

Here's a few examples: missing or misplaced punctuation (i.e. "She knew many witches some near..." "I' am old..."), paragraphs improperly indented, repetitious phrasing, improper word use., jumping tenses (i.e. "A good witch is always attuned to nature," she said as she pets her cat and rocked back and forth in her rocking chair.") and, in the same paragraph, weird sentence structure ("As her cat eased into her craving the warmth of her body Sandra suddenly stood up.") The list goes on. 

Second, the writing was ridiculously infantile. I noticed this at the opening when the sheriff was shouting at her to open the door. ​Then the silly recipe for youth and the absurd, very short incantation that took her into the future (which she later referred to as a spell). The dialogue sounded as if it was written by a seven year old. The whole thing sounded as if it was written by a seven year old. Let's take a look at the incantation that took her into the future (typed as it appeared in the eBook):

​     "Oh, wise and great Gods of Travel take me to Portland, Maine in the Twenty-first Century!"

​Notice first the poor punctuation, capitalization, etc. Next, how would she even know about Portland, Maine. The Salem witch trials took place in the late 1600s. Portland, Maine wasn't even founded until the late 1700s. And "Gods of Travel"? Really? Geez.

Then her comparisons of artwork:

      "Nowadays modern art was so weird and wondrous all mixed up colors kind of like graffiti almost whereas, the old masters only painted Christian and religious scenes from the Bible."

​Again, written exactly as it appears in the book, but draw your attention to 'graffiti' because she asks the proprietor how much it would be to buy the "graffiti"? Like so much of her familiarity with the future, how would she know what graffiti is? She also seems to know what a fridge, oven, etc. is, yet queries over what the Internet, phone, and computer is.

Lastly, there was nothing to suggest she had time to pack anything in her haste to escape her fate in Salem; that she simply made her brew, returned to her youth, then said a few quick words and appeared in the future, yet in Chapter 4 she seems to be sitting at her kitchen table enjoying a cup of "rare blend of strong black tea she had bought in the late fifteen hundreds from a man in Africa." That would be an interesting feat, since she states that she isn't quite ninety years of age at the beginning of the book. She would have had to be either an infant or still in her momma's womb to purchase something in the late fifteen hundreds.

I rarely rate books so poorly, but this one was simply horrid. Blessedly, it was only 6,000 words, which in my estimation was about 5,999 too many. It makes me wonder whether those who rated this four stars even bothered to read it.