The Boy Who Chased After His Shadow by Jeff Jacobson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
“The Boy Who Chased After His Shadow” ( Broom Closet Stories #3), by Jeff Jacobson, is an LGBTQ YA fantasy novel about Charlie Creevey, a gay 16-year-old witch.
Charlie along, his Aunt Beverly, and the witch community of Seattle, Washington, must stop Grace and her rogue group of witches from killing young witches to increase their power.
I wanted to love this book but it just didn’t do it for me.
First, there were the pacing issues. It took o we 80 pages for the plot to get going, largely because Jacobson spent so much time retreading the events of the previous books.
And when events would happen, you were treated to pages after pages of exposition with that ground the plot to a stop.
Second, I never feared for Charlie or any of the other main characters. The stakes were never high enough. While Grace and company were there, they were mostly a minor inconvenience.
So, when we’re told the Seattle witch community is terrified of Grace, this rings hollow.
Moreover, the final confrontation between Charlie’s group and Grace group was the definition of anticlimactic, and then the story just stops a few chapters later leaving a ton of loose threads.
Most of the characters came off as one-dimensional and had zero development. The only reason I didn’t give this one stars is because Charlies and Diego’s scenes together were so adorable. But that alone couldn’t save this book.
Overall, it read more like a first draft and desperately needed more work before being released.
2.0 out of 5 stars
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