*I was sent a copy of The Not So Chosen One in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Text Publishing and Kate Emery*

Synopsis: 

Lucy is just a regular teenager with regular worries: homework, friends, getting home for dinner on time. Oh, and there’s the small matter of how she’s going to tell her mother about her unplanned pregnancy.

So when she first hears about Drake’s College, a school for students with magical talent, she’s sure someone’s messing with her. But despite her scepticism, she’s soon swept up into a world beyond her wildest imaginings—and now she’s got something else to hide.

At Drake’s, Lucy befriends Jack, a teacher’s assistant who has secrets of his own. More concerningly, Lucy’s ‘talent’ doesn’t seem to be materialising, and one of the other students collapses in a mysterious incident. There’s danger in the air…

Review: 

I really struggled to get into The Not So Chosen One at first. The characters didn’t seem interesting and it felt like it was going to be a carbon copy of The Magicians, which is referenced multiple times throughout. Thankfully this changed, but it did take me until around the halfway mark to get actually invested. 

Again around the halfway mark, I was starting to wonder why the author decided to make Lucy pregnant as it did seem like a pointless plot point. At this point, it bore no significance to what was happening and I entirely forgot she was pregnant. There was, however, a scene where Lucy throws up because of her pregnancy and a background character made a dig at Lucy about her having an eating disorder which really wasn’t cool. There was literally no point for that to be added it made me a little angry I won’t lie. 

After this point, I did figure out very quickly why Lucy is pregnant and it became very clear to me where this story was going. No spoilers here but it was a pretty good plot twist, if not a little guessable. 

You don’t see a whole lot of the magic system in this world, but it did seem very interesting. But also quite complex. Having to use specific hand gestures and knowing the positioning of the sun and moon for spells to work means I would not like to be a caster in this world. Usually I dream of being a magic user in these types of books, but The Not So Chosen One world is not one of those. Nothing wrong with that obviously, it’s actually quite refreshing to see a magic system that isn’t just ‘I’ve somehow figured out how to do everything myself and now I’m the best magic user in the world’. 

The Not So Chosen One was quite slow to get going but I actually quite enjoyed it in the end. At times it felt like the story wasn’t moving, but the last half of the book was pretty fast-paced and the last few chapters were exciting and also very explanatory. The ending of the book suggests that maybe another instalment will be coming in the future and honestly I would look forward to reading it.

The Not So Chosen One is available now!

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