Moonset

Moonset (Legacy of Moonset #1) by Scott Tracey

Justin Daggett, his trouble-making sister, and their three orphan-witch friends have gotten themselves kicked out of high school. Again. Now they’ve ended up in Carrow Mills, New York, the town where their parents—members of the terrorist witch organization known as Moonset—began their evil experiments with the dark arts one generation ago.

When the siblings are accused of unleashing black magic on the town, Justin fights to prove their innocence. But tracking down the true culprit leads him to a terrifying discovery about Moonset’s past . . . and its deadly future.

2 stars

Thank you to Flux and NetGalley for this eARC! This title will be available April 8th.

This review was completed by guest reviewer Sarah from Adventures in Storyland! Thank you, Sarah!

“Moonset. The name we’d inherited from our parents, now a slur as bad as any other four letter word. Even fifteen years after their death, people didn’t use the word Moonset lightly.

Because of it, we had people like Miss Virago, following us around. Waiting for the mistake that would push us over the edge from ‘innocent’ to ‘dangerous.’

Waiting for the day they could kill us, too.”

Moonset follows five teenagers, the surviving children of a cult behind a lethal uprising in the magical community. They’re cared for by the magic government, constantly moved around from town to town and school to school, and are generally mistrusted because of their heritage. This first novel in a series involves the teens getting trapped into a plot to draw out a warlock, and it’s entirely possible that no one cares whether or not they live through the attempt.

Moonset starts off rocky and then pretty much continues to be rocky right up until the rocky end. It’s not a bad book, it just didn’t really catch my attention. I had trouble connecting to any of the characters, and flat-out hated others. The protagonist, Justin, was okay but he never interested me that much. His twin, Jenna, is a bratty diva with anger issues that I spent the entire book wanting to punch. The other siblings mostly fade into the background. The love interest, Ash, is squashed into the role of manic pixie dream girl for most of the novel.

The plot is okay, but everything moves rather slowly. There’s a lot of talking and thinking and people not trusting them, but between the first chapter and the last half of the book, not a lot of action. Luckily, the magic system and world-building of this magic community are actually pretty awesome. I was really interested in learning about how their magic works and it’s pretty cool.

Basically, if you’re into magic teens and some political mayhem, you’d probably dig the book. I initially gave it a 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads, but I think I’m going to downgrade to 2 out of 5 stars. It didn’t keep me nearly interested enough.