Unwritten by Alicia J. NovoMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A solid YA portal fantasy that builds on the idea of book characters having their own lives outside the pages (similarly to Jasper Fforde or a few other authors).
While it occasionally strays into cliche (for example, in the final villain confrontation), at least nobody has green eyes. The worldbuilding is original, though it provides more questions than answers sometimes, and (as you perhaps might expect from a world based on books) the magic and technology appear to be able to do whatever is plot-convenient. The world ended up, for me, feeling a bit like a movie set that's only finished where the camera is pointing, and would be revealed as just bits of wood and canvas if you went round the back. But that's a complaint I often have; truly immersive worldbuilding is hard to do, especially if you're attempting something original, and I'd rather someone attempted originality and ended up slightly less than acing it than that they built the whole thing out of prefabricated parts.
The main character starts out as the usual uniquely special, socially outcast young woman with missing or abusive parents who's angry and impulsive and can't control her powers; but she's not a whiner, she doesn't instantly slobber over the love interest, and she does have a character arc that involves her exercising some agency and having some personal growth. So, better than average.
The secondary characters are perhaps slightly too numerous, and several of them (maybe as a result) are underdeveloped, but at least they don't help the MC for no reason. There are a number of useful minor antagonists - she's not one of those heroines who everyone inexplicably loves and goes out of their way to assist - and, while a bit of realistic dystopianism makes its way into the setting, it's not a political screed. I spotted the main villain slightly ahead of the reveal, but only slightly. (view spoiler)
There's a mystery plot (decoding a message) which helps to keep things moving and provides interim goals, and it's handled with variety, not just the same kind of solution over and over.
Overall, then, pretty solid, though with a way to go before it's truly excellent. There are some cliche elements, the worldbuilding is not always the clearest, some of the minor characters I found forgettable and hard to distinguish, and (in the pre-publication version I had from Netgalley), it suffers from some not-quite-right idioms and vocabulary choices. It definitely shows potential, though, and I found it above average for the genre.
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