I enjoyed Lisa Maxwell's magical tale, Unhooked last year and I was excited to read her newest one that promised to be just as magical. But sadly, The Last Magician just didn't hold enough magic for me. I found myself struggling to comprehend what was happening within the first few pages. When the description was telling me I'd be following a teenage girl named Esta, I couldn't quite figure out who our other point of view was.

I'm assuming it was the elusive magician the title gets its name for, but sadly I never found out. Not only was the switching of point of views a bit more confusing than I'm used to, but there's the added factor of time travel. Time traveling has always been messy business for me, if you don't explain it just right and have it be understandable I pretty much become lost in the science or magic of it all.

Within the amount that I read, the chapters were constantly changing between Esta and our mystery man/possible magician, but I guess it was the not knowing who this guy was and what his role was or would be just made it harder to follow the story. Let alone all the characters this mystery man was involved with. I knew Esta and I started to get to know her friends and what the group she was apart of, but I knew nothing of our other storyteller.

And it was because I was struggling to understand who all the players were that soon the reading of this book became tiresome. The enjoyment and excitement I felt when I was finally able to read it was gone. I was just so lost and confused I felt like I needed to know more about the mystery man and if he truly was the magician and what his role in the story was. I went in expecting to follow Esta on her journey and learn her story, but the added story filled with a new main character and a cast of side characters involved in their own world was just too much added information for me to handle with no background knowledge of who and what they were.

So it was with great sadness and dismay that I had to DNF this one.