Joan Greenwood, the youngest of a ruling family of witches, can’t do magic. When she returns home after 7 years away, she finds her indifferent relatives focused on a local debacle: a normal mortal has been turned into a witch by a spell. When her best friend gets involved in trying to help this hapless pawn, Joan can’t help but get involved too, but the choice may mean choosing between biological family and found family.

An Unlikely Coven is the first in a new series, and this is the authors debut novel. The book is urban fantasy, set in a New York that the reader will recognise, but the world is ruled by witches, though they keep it hidden, and there are also vampires, ghosts and other supernatural creatures. The book features a cast of characters that include BIPOC and LGBTQ+ representation. The target audience for this book means that it’s also YA fiction.

The grammar and syntax in this one was really odd to me. On page one, for example, we get this line: “This was no great surprise to Joan, but she had expected better anyways.” First of all, that’s bad writing and an ugly sentence, and I hate that it ends with “anyways”. What editor allowed that? But it’s also horribly contradictory: If she was not surprised, she hadn’t expected better, and if she expected better, she would be surprised. There’s quite a lot of things like this throughout the book. It’s also broken into Acts, for no reason other than someone thought it seemed intellectual.

The book also lacks internal logic at times, featuring plotholes like this one: Joan’s family fail to pick her up when she returns to town by train. In the same chapter, she takes a magical teleportation system that has stops all over the world, including right by her ancestral home. So, why was she taking a train at all? Why did she need to be picked up? It makes no sense. Again, this kind of thing happens a lot in this book. It means that the book reads like fanfic, rather than a published novel.

I’m not alone amongst readers in noticing this trend creeping into books lately with bad writing, plot holes and grammatical issues not being picked up by editors. I don’t like to call the authors out too much for this, because a it’s also on the editing teams, who should be picking up on this. Sadly, this seems to be happening in books targeted at Young Adults most commonly. They deserve good books, but I think the powers that be in publishing may be banking on this age group not having the experience of a long lifetime of reading widely to have developed discernment yet to know better. That bothers me.

Once you get past that issue, there are some OK bones here. I liked some of the lead characters and their found family journey. I think they seemed to be teenagers a lot more than adults, asking permission and sneaking out, even though they were in their mid-twenties and had graduated from university. I liked the amount of diversity. I think the story world was fine, though it had it’s odd points. Here, vampires live in packs, which was an odd choice of collective noun. We’re told that witches are the ruling class in this world, but the logic for why seems half baked, when the other supernatural creatures live longer than them and seemingly have powers of their own at their disposal. That said, I think the author was having fun with mixing up the magical world with a cast of ghosts and people and witches and vampires, and trying to be a bit whimsical and I can get behind that impulse. There’s an odd internal logic that the Greenwoods are written about as though they are merely selfish, flawed, but mostly OK, and yet there are hints that they behave in ways that are something akin to the Medicis or the Borgias, which is not cute. It’s unclear in tone if we’re meant to dismiss their evil acts like Joan does, or if they really are bad people. It makes the book lopsided.

Taken as a whole, it needs editing and tightening up. Taken as a Young Adult book, perhaps it appeals to it’s target market in a way I don’t understand, and some may find it cute and quippy, and that’s OK. I do think some will have the same problems with it that I do.

Read It If: you feel like the story sounds appealing and you’re looking for diverse characters and magic, but be aware that it’s a flawed one.

Thank you to HBG Canada for the ARC for review.