From Goodreads: A modern retelling of the German fairy tale “Tristan and Isolde,” Tris and Izzie is about a young witch named Izzie who is dating Mark King, the captain of the basketball team and thinks her life is going swimmingly well. Until — she makes a love potion for her best friend Brangane and then ends up taking it herself accidentally, and falling in love with Tristan, the new guy at school.

________________________________________

Egmont USA has been extremely gracious in allowing me to read an ARC of this novel, via Netgalley, prior to its release today, and it pains me to say that this is going to be yet another negative review for this novel.  If you use Goodreads, you’ll see the same thing I did when I began reading this novel: its overall rating, from over 230 users, is a 2.22.    Out of those 230+ users, 140 gave the novel a two or lower on the rating scale.  So, as you can see, this novel hasn’t been getting the best reviews.  And, after reading the novel myself, I now know why (please be advised, you may view the information below as a bit of a spoiler, so beware).

For me, the low rating has nothing to do with the writing style.  In my opinion, Harrison is a good writer; her prose is very well written.  It’s the characters, and the almost wishy-washy relationships that they have, that did it for me.  It’s almost choppy, in a way.  I like Tristan, and Izzie is a somewhat likeable character, but the relationships within the story had me saying, “really?” most of the time.  At no point did I ever feel like the characters were in love with each other, and that goes for Izzie and Tristan, Izzie and Mark, and Mark and Brangane.  The relationships actually felt like a fifth grade infatuation.  The characters are able to go from “love” to “love” in an instant, and there is no bad blood between any of them, and this is where the characters’ interactions with one another become unbelievable.  Yes, this is a fairy tale novel, with other worlds, giants, talking snakes, and witches, but I do want the actions of my characters to be life-like, and I just wasn’t feeling it with this story.  Sadly, I can only give this novel one and a half stars.