Book Review: Witches of East End

TITLE: Witches of East End
Book 1 in the new Beauchamp Family series
AUTHOR: Melissa de la Cruz
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: Adult
GENRE: urban fantasy, witches, romance
SHORT PREMISE: A woman and her two daughters are witches living in a town in New England.
MY REVIEW: The premise pretty much explains the book. I admit I checked this out from the library hesitantly because I was less then enamoured with Blue Bloods. But the idea sounded cool and I figured that maybe Cruz's adult writing would be better then her YA books. Unfortunately it's pretty much more of the same old.
Cruz's writing hasn't improved any, which is odd considering I'm sure she's written at least eight books since Blue Bloods and now. This book had all the problems I had with Blue Bloods: boring until the last eighty or so pages and that wasn't enough to convince me to continue reading. Rather annoyingly token characters. This one had the librarian, the party girl, the mothering one, the gay guy and so forth. None of them really had any depth either and I didn't like the ones that I wasn't utterly bored with. I did like the weaving of the mythology that she had in there. That was somewhat interesting. However it was also a tad confusing. Then I looked online and discovered that apparently this book comes with another book: Witches101 that helps you understand the mythology or whatever. Um...I'm sorry but I shouldn't have to buy a book in order to understand another book. That's ridiculous and obviously a ploy to get more money. I don't appreciate it, Cruz (or publisher, who's ever responsible for that marketing ploy). Also for an adult book, it felt remarkably juvenile. The only real adult thing in it was the sex. If you had gut out that, this could have been a YA book.
This book had some compelling ideas but it wasn't enough to make me care about it and I detest that I needed to buy something else to understand it better. Unless you are a huge Cruz fan. I say skip this one. I think I'm done with Cruz's books, they just don't do anything for me.
WHO SHOULD READ: older Melissa de la Cruz fans, fans of Charmed
MY RATING: Two and a half out of Five witches