Book Review: Crushed by K.C. Blake

Title: Crushed
Series: The Witch-Game #1
Author: K.C. Blake

Publisher: Self-published

Release Date: July 13th, 2011

Source: e-book from  author for review

Goodreads Synopsis:

The Noah sisters rule Titan High with their beauty, brains, and magical powers.

Each year they play a secret game: Crushed. The girls pick their targets carefully and blow enchanted dust into the boy’s faces, charming them, but this year Kristen makes a grave mistake. She chooses the wrong boy and almost dies that same day. Coincidence? Maybe.

But something isn’t quite right about Zach Bevian. He doesn’t behave like a boy who’s been Crushed. He goes from hot to cold, from looking at her with contempt to asking her out on a date. She doesn’t know what to think. Does he hate her or is he truly falling for her? Is he trying to kill her, or is he trying to save her?


My Thoughts:

Witches. I’ve been eager to read novels about witches and wizards but I haven’t come across any witchcraft-related novels, until ‘Crushed’ came along. I initially expected a sinister and mysterious novel (because witches are evil, right?) but what I read was almost the complete opposite. It was like a typical high school romance novel but with an added paranormal twist – witches playing a game with their power. At first, I found this concept difficult to believe; I mean, witches attending high school and pretending to be normal just seemed strange to me, but I was able to adapt to this and ended up actually enjoying the book.

Crushed has a great premise; the Noah sisters play this game called Crushed where each person must ‘crush’ a guy (with magical dust) and the guy will have to comply with anything she asks of him. There were many scenes which involved the girls fighting with their power, but I had hoped these spells could’ve been described and explained more.

The characters weren’t overly impressive or anything as they didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. Zach, the male lead is supposed to be the ‘bad boy’ but apart from his tardiness and tendency to appear to not care about anything, there really wasn’t anything else that suggested a bad boy image. Kristen, smart, pretty and popular is the polar opposite of Zach; she’s perfect. I usually don’t quite like reading about popular girls, because really, what is there to say, apart from how everyone envies them? But Kristen was tolerable; I might not have liked her at times, but at least she wasn’t annoying and whiny. I did however, like how the Blake effectively captured a teen’s inner feelings of guilt, jealously and competitiveness.

There was a fair amount of teenage drama; girls stealing boyfriends, competing to be popular, you name it. I had no problems with the situations that arised, but most of the drama resolved too fast for my liking. It’s like, a major problem occurred and five minutes later, everything was fine again. Most of the dialogues were colloquial, which was fine since teens do talk like that these days, but I still felt there was an overuse of OMGes and FYIs.

I’ve realised many books use ‘love’ as the ultimate weapon to defeat the enemy. While love is definitely powerful, I feel like it’s being overused. Whenever a difficult problem arises, the only method to resolve it is to use the love one character feels for another, and the enemy will somehow lose. This has officially become a clichéd resolution to me. However, apart from that, I truly enjoyed certain scenes from the novel .

Rating: 3.5 stars