Volatile Bonds

Volatile Bonds (2017) Jaye Wells

One of the things I like about kindle books is that you can mark typos and other errors and submit them. Does this information go anywhere? Probably not, but it makes me feel better.

The editing of this book was so bad that I didn’t bother submitting errors, because I couldn’t even figure out where to begin with some of them.

Of course, as I went to write this, I noticed there was no published listed on Amazon, nor could I find one in the book. So there is a lesson to you–you really cannot do without an editor. One of the reasons I didn’t catch it is because the did a good job making the cover look like the previous three in the book. The model is different, but that’s not unusual, and the font is similar enough that I thought it was the same as the previous book, and the feel of the cover is the same. So, good there.

I just wish they’d spent as much time editing the book as they did getting the cover right.

Kate Prospero has made sure her uncle–head of the Votive coven–is locked away in prison, but it seems like he’s still managing to run things from there. In the meantime, she’s still seconded to the Magical Enforcement Agency, trying to take down practitioners or dirty magic, and to keep what is on the streets relatively safe.

Plus, her younger brother, whom she has raised, still isn’t happy in high school, although he is less miserable than he was. And her best friend still doesn’t have a job. And she’s sleeping with her partner (but it’s not a relationship, just boinking).

Here’s the thing about this book. I love the variety of characters. The members of the MEA belong to all kinds of categories, and it isn’t a big deal–it’s just presented as the way things are. Which is awesome. And I enjoy the world building–the world that is like ours, except with magic, and the consequences that would have.

Which is why it’s so frustrating this book was all over the place. As I said, the editing was all but non-existent, so there were typos and tense errors and pronoun inconsistency all over the place. And the story needed tightened up as well. There weren’t continuity errors, but weird things were emphasized and then kinda disappeared. Things were swept under the rug that should have been issues, and characters and organizations behaved in a way that didn’t seem entirely consistent.

That said, I did enjoy catching up with the happenings in Babylon, and I still appreciate the difficulty that Kate has with raising her brother, and being a female law-enforcement agent. I just wish the book had gone through far more strenuous editing before being published. I get it that self-publishing is difficult, but that editing would have made this a much stronger book.
Rating: 5/10 (for editing issues)

Published by the author(?)

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