Would not recommend. This book was just bad. It had no plot, was riddled with errors, and I couldn't finish it.

Not for me. Maybe YA's will enjoy it, but I thought the book pretty poorly written and and that interesting. DNF. I wouldn't recommend it if a teen asked about it. But maybe it will appeal to someone. Sorry. it sounded so promising, too.

This book... was this book even edited? It might have an interesting premise if it wasn't so obviously unedited, rushed, reads-like-a-thirteen-year-olds-work-of-fanfiction.

Not for me, I'm afraid.

I received this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was on the NYT bestsellers list for 23 hours before it was found that they just figured out how to fraud the system. This book is objectively such a bad book that that was probably the only way for it to even be known about. Honestly it's awful to the point that I'm not sure what I've read.

I know they want to make it a film but I got bored trying to imagine it as a movie. There are a lot of books that come off like screenplays, this book is not one of those. It came off like a book that desperately needed an editor.

It's a little irritating, the writing style of the book, where the sentences seem to go on forever, and the idea that a comma can keep things going indefinitely, but it's actually just irritating, and who knows how long these sentences will go on for, certainly not the editor.

We're also given so many pointless asides that distrcted from the story itself. Was it that important to know the status of the main character's thigh gap? Apparently so. Want to know what one character had for breakfast off screen that the narrator happened to hear about? So much of what happens or what is said doesn't drive anything. Not the plot. Not development.

It's supposed to be some sort of urban fantasy, but her act aside the 1st bits we see of that is 38% into the book. The hints of it are heavy handed and I was so bored by the time there's a hint of magic that my interest was not piqued.

The main character has the emotional range of a toddler. One minute she's fine and the next she's holding back from punching someone. There's no middle for her. Everything seems to be some absurd extreme. None of her reasonings make sense. Beyond that, she's a stand in for the author - who clearly is super humble. That's sarcasm right there because we're told over and over again about how she's just the right kind of pretty. Guys fawn over her. Wayne Newton, Carrot Top, first name basis! But we don't see how or why. It's so odd. She was a no name from Tennessee and suddenly the bigwigs in Vegas know her personally? How did that happen?

The character introductions are super muddled. They seem to get multiple introductions and that leads to some confusion. The other characters all seem to serve one specific purpose. Whether the bitchy jealous girl, the male best friend, or the love interests.

The main love interest Mac is kind of a creep. He rages at her, creeps in at her get measursed for her costumes, but has a HUGE crush on her.

I quit the book at around the 41% mark. Everyone is at a concert featuring a band made up of a lot of the crew members from their show (and second love interest). They're the Plain White Ts! Whatever. She ends up flirting with both love interests and I ended up quitting. I skipped to the end if the book and it seemed just as predictable and bad.

Make no mistake, this book is bad. It's not even fun bad. This book is author wish fulfillment to an absurd degree with no editor to help it.

0 stars. Editors exist for a reason.

HANDBOOK FOR MORTALS by Lani Sarem has controversy swirling around it and perhaps that is why I wanted to give this train wreck a shot. The story of Zade, a young woman with true magical talent that begins working in a Vegas magic show, has some potential for an interesting plot, but unfortunately fails pretty flat in execution. Zade is written kind of like an empty-headed valley girl, who only really thinks about male attention and looking attractive. Without the main character being likable, it's hard as the reader to have an interest in what happens to her. The only character, although still rather stock and stereotypical, is the head crew member, Mac. He's got some grit and texture about him, but the book only really touches the surface of who he really is. Another strike against the book are the grammatical and spelling errors; errors that in a published book are hard to ignore and cheaper the quality of it.
I'm not saying that with a little more editing and proofreading that HANDBOOK FOR MORTALS would become a quality book, but I think it could have been more than it is.

Disappointed, this is just a movie teaser a waste of effort and time.

Made it a third of the way through the book and the most interesting aspect of all (the heroine's magic) is barely mentioned.

When I’m reading a book that I got in exchange for a review, I have a wad of paper next to me to make notes about what I like and dislike (as you do). Through reading this, I ran out of paper. Make of that what you will.

Okay so first off, I will be reviewing the book as just a book and not judging it based on the actions of the author and/or publishing company. The first thing that caught my eye on this book was admittedly the cover and I adored it… until I learnt that a lesser known artist had actually had their copyright breached by the publishing company in order to make the stunning cover, so I wont be judging the book on that either!

The plot of this book had some promise and is so very trope heavy. If the book read as if it had been published as something other than a draft copy, I could see it being the kind of story that people would be all over. The main character is the daughter of the small town fortune teller and wants to move to Las Vegas to get her big break as a magicians assistant and the search for a “normal” life. Men love her, women hate her. All that jazz. It sounds like the sort of magic realism that I would wholeheartedly enjoy, however…

At the beginning of the book there was a foreword and I’m not really sure why; I have only ever seen these in books by renowned authors or on books that have been published years after they were first released but this was a debut author… Lani Sarem (that is Laannee or as she would say Annie with an L, just in case you were wondering).

The author has blatantly modelled Zade (that is like ‘aide’, but add a Z and full name Scheherazade Esther Holden – you cant make this up) on herself. Not only has she repeated the pronunciation of her name – who would pronounce Zade as Zaad anyway?! – but the description of our main character is pretty much what you would say when looking at Sarem’s author picture. Zade is not likeable in the slightest and is possibly one of the most judgemental main characters I have come across in a while, not only is she not “hot-girl skinny” (that’s followed with more descriptors of the author, no, I mean Zade) but she hates stuck-up people, which is a classic call of a stuck-up person. She also suffers from dyslexia. Allegedly. I know a fair few people who have dyslexia, including my brother, but I have never come across anybody who has this type of dyslexia which isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist but I do genuinely wonder if Sarem researched dyslexia at all before making her main character a sufferer of it; Zade “could write things perfectly – but [she] wrote them backwards”. Hmm. (The symptoms of dyslexia can helpfully be found here http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Dyslexia/Pages/Symptoms.aspx , just in case you were interested.)

The prose is not great. At all. I felt like I was reading terrible slice-of-life Harry Potter fanfiction back in my early high school years – my taste in fanfiction has gone up dramatically, let it be known – when reading this. Not that I’m the biggest fan of first person prose anyway, but in sections we do have the story told from a third person prospective and it just jumped around so much that it made me a little dizzy. I know it is magical realism and meant to be fantasy but the reactions of the characters are just unrealistic to the point where they are hilarious. Just no. Stop it.

I made myself finish this book as I was optimistically hoping that it would get better. It didn’t. It could have been the third of the size and edited within an inch of its life, and I’m still not sure that it could have been salvaged – although it would have been much more pleasant to read. Hopefully the book lends itself to the screen but I can honestly say that I will not go to see it based on the book alone nor will I be reading further in the series.

Since there are so many people giving it 1 star without reading it, I figured I would play devil's advocate and give it a read. It wasn't terrible -- it was, however, very unrefined and would have benefited greatly from better editing. If the author and publisher hadn't antagonized booksellers and libraries by cheating their way on to the best seller lists and making a cover that looks suspiciously like someone else's art, I don't think it would have the 1 star rating it has today. Maybe more like... a 3.

I decided to treat this book like any other first-time fantasy novel I would get from Netgalley, and give it an honest go.

I was moderately entertained, particularly by the last third or so. The premise is neat -- the protagonist is a young female Vegas magician, Zade, whose big secret is that she can really do magic, and who is struggling to keep her magic a secret from the techs, performers, and stage hands who are increasingly curious about how she can pull off such feats. In that regard, it reminds me of a couple books that I loved, like The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. There is a vague notion of a possible villain, possibly doing villainous things -- but they appear to be the next book's problem. This book is mostly about resolving a love triangle.

...a love triangle where one of the love interests is the guitar player for the Plain White T's. Yes, the popular band. Although Wikipedia tells me that no one named Jackson has ever been in the band -- and while the real Plain White T's got their start in the 90's playing in bars around Chicago, this version of them in the book is the jam band for a magic show in modern Vegas, and hasn't made it big yet.

So, that's a little bizarre and a bit off-putting, and made me physically face palm.

The big climax of the book comes when Zade attempts a new stunt full of dangerous magic and something goes wrong, rendering her bloody and catatonic. The lead magician and one of her love interests whisks her away to her mother's home in Tennessee to see if her mother's magic can save her when medicine couldn't, revealing her secrets in the process.

I repeat: cool story line; bad editing. The story was told in a mix of first-person by Zade and omnipotent third person narration following around various other characters. It got a bit confusing at times, and would have benefited greatly from being completely first-person or completely third-person. At times I got thrown off on who the narrative was talking about. It caused the story to miss out on a lot of character-building nuance.

I'll probably read book 2 in the hopes that it is better edited. It's a shame that the publisher and the author shot themselves in the foot the way that they did with this one by angering the booksellers, bloggers, and libraries that should be a book's biggest advocates. It would have been so much better had they released some limited ARCs, got some scathing-yet-encouraging reviews, and re-released a better edited and more coherent version.

So, in sum: it doesn't deserve all the hate it gets.
But it certainly needs some work.

This is quite possibly the worst story I've ever read. Every painful cliche possible has been put in and it's so clear that the author has cast herself as the main character.

After reading a little bit of this book and finding myself, frankly, confused, I googled it. Oh boy. The controversy surrounding this book has disgusted me, that an 'author' would undermine the hard work and dedication of actual authors to gain whatever it is they hoped to gain. I cannot, and will not, support someone who has been proven to game the system. Please look further into this before forming a final opinion on this book.
As for the actual writing? Run on sentences, blatant and confusing product placement, terrible vocabulary. I didn't want to read it, I didn't enjoy reading it, and I didn't finish reading it.

I tried to read this. I really tried. I took it with me up to the hospital when I had to admit my Mom but the I could not connect with any of the characters whatsoever.

On top of that, this novel felt like it was written by a teenager on the cusp of writing her first fanfiction.

And this is where this story should have been - the fanfiction section.

The main character, Zade, is this beautiful young woman but she does not see herself in such a way. She sees herself as "plain" and "different". These are typically the red flags of the makings of a Mary Sue. The plain girl with these supernatural powers whom everyone either hates because of her beauty and power or falls in absolute love with.

From the chapters I have read, there really seemed to be no character built. We don't learn how she gets to the point where she has made the ultimate decision to leave behind what seems to be a normal home and strike out on her own. I understand that all teenagers go through this stage but all we are given at the beginning is Zade doesn't want to be part of what her mother's world - tarot reading. Instead, she wants to strike out and work on a magic show.

A magic show?

Is that like going from the pan to the oven? Because I thought she didn't want to be in a world filled with things she was trying to get away from? Or am I missing something?

Honestly this book should be removed and returned to the drawing board. The entire story needs an overhaul and lots of edits to it.

But I suppose when you buy your way into NYT Best Seller list, you really believe your story is the "bestest" out there.