First impressions:

This book was a little too wish fulfillment-y at the beginning, but later parts got better. It might be because I have trouble reading the trope where “kid is born in the wrong family and actually has magic powers so she should leave her home and discover the magical world where she’s awesome.”

Sophie Foster really carried this book. Despite how her arc has her as a protagonist who discovers her magical heritage, she’s actually pretty interesting as a character. When I read her dialogue, I read her in the voice of the voice actress Ashley Johnson’s characters, she’s got the vibes of her character. In fact, if this book gets an animated series, she should voice her. I liked how shy and insecure she was. She was honestly pretty cute as I was seeing her in this book.

I was a little worried about how the book was going to use the telepathy, since it might use the just world fallacy of “if you’ve got nothing to hide; what are you scared for?” But luckily it teaches the protagonist that she can’t try to dig through people’s personal info.

Despite what I said above about Sophie carrying this book, I feel like many of her victories and powers were unearned. She’s supposedly someone unique in this world, but she doesn’t learn how to use these abilities (most of the time), she just pulls them from nowhere.

Overall: it was an okay read in the first half, but the second half really brought everything together.