Conjured

by Sarah Beth Durst

Eve is a girl placed in a special witness protection program that concentrates on people like her who can do magic.  They protect her and other strong magic-weilders from a mysterious serial killer who has been targeting people like them.  However, Eve cannot use her magic without blacking out and having visions of the Magician and the Storyteller, and she has no memory of her life before the witness protection, except for a few flashes here and there.  Often, when she blacks out, she'll lose days, weeks, or even months of her memories.  All she knows is that she is very important to the people trying to catch the serial killer, and they need her to remember her past.
The plot developed slowly, but not in a bad way.  It took a while to figure out what was going on, but figuring it out was interesting.  The memory loss was done pretty well, and the characters were consistent and distinct.  Three of the characters - Aiden, Topher, and Victoria - struck me as superfluous.  Their main purpose was to push Eve on to discover things, but she could very well have discovered them on her own.  There's also some slight backstory, but it is barely explored, and it is not important enough to merit being mentioned.  If the book had more scope, which I would have liked, then the backstories could have been very interesting and I would have liked these characters a lot more.
The end was extremely rushed.  It happened suddenly, and everything was handed to Eve.  She spent the whole book trying to figure out what was going on, and in the end, it was simply explained to her.  The end scenes were short and happened one after another.  Expanding the end would have made the book more enjoyable and it would have made it possible to expand the scope and include the other characters a little more.  The pacing for most of the book was a slow build-up, and for the end to happen at the rate it did was disappointing.
This book is a 3.  Decent writing, decent plot, decent characters.  It is bread; it is not great, but not bad. It isn't the fresh-out-of-the-oven, homemade, soft-in-the-middle bread - which I think it could have been if it had been written differently - but it is also not the limp, tasteless bread that is better off left uneaten.