ARC Review: Tris & Izzy

Title: Tris & Izzy
Author: Mette Ivie Harrison
Genre: YA Fantasy
Release Date: October 11th


A modern retelling of the German fairytale "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. --Goodreads

Thank you, NetGalley, and EgmontUSA, for the opportunity to read this. This, of course, does not affect my opinion in any way.



It’s not like me to hate a book. Yes, I’ve disliked quite a few. Found some nitpicks. But hate? Very rare.
With Tris & Izzy though, I was on the borderline of just flat-out hating it. If it hadn’t been on my e-reader, I may have even thrown it across the room. Wow, so unlike me to even rag on something so much like that, it’s unreal. Something just really annoyed me about this one, though. The characters, perhaps? I still can't quite put my finger on it. I fount a lot of aggravating "nitpicks" in this.

The idea was there. Genuinely, I thought it would have been a fantastic idea. Magic, monsters, romance… a re-telling of the infamous Tristan and Isolde. Who wouldn’t want to read something like that?! But no, the execution was just awful. My dear, Mette Ivie Harrison, oftentimes you wrote as if the readers were stupid and amateur. Allow me to clue you in. Most YA readers are in fact older, a lot even are adults.

Details were lacking. The flow was off because of this… it felt so monotone. Events and actions made by the characters in some areas were unrealistic. The dialogue so cheesy and the characters absolutely had no dimension or depth. Such a beautiful cover to lure the readers. Hook, line, and sinker all right. I really wanted to love this story, but I just couldn’t. In the end, I just laughed at it. I’m sorry.

If you’re younger than fourteen, you may like this book, love it even. But if you’re older, wiser, or have read a lot more, then it probably won’t work out as great for you, either. I don’t think I’ll be on the recommending side of this one.

I was going to give it one star. But in the light of being nice, and the fact that I did think the author did step outside of the box and come up with a decent idea- just did terrible with the execution of it- I’ll give it two stars.