Magical Artifacts Institute: The Complete Series by Isa MedinaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Maddie Dover: Too stupid to live, too lucky to die, too cute to stay mad at.
So, basically a cat. She certainly has the curiosity and the always landing on her feet parts down.
To be fair to her, she does also come up with some plans that could be described as clever and brave, not just ones that can be described as naive and foolhardy (though some of those, too, particularly early on). She has a fun voice, and is an appealing and always well-intentioned character, who makes allies readily, an important trait in an urban fantasy protagonist (especially an underpowered one).
Her love interest is the usual reserved, brooding, emotionally defended hot action wizard, so we don't get to see much depth to him. But we do get to see her rescue him, more often than vice versa, so there's that.
The copy editing at first looked pretty clean, which is why I picked it up even though it seemed like it would be fairly light and insubstantial and potentially constructed mostly out of tropes. I suspect (I could be wrong) that a very good editor has been over a not particularly great manuscript and, inevitably, missed some things; there are a large number of places where idioms are fumbled, not quite the right vocabulary word is chosen, or a sentence changes grammatical direction partway through, but at least the punctuation is mostly in the right places. It was a light read, though not as made-from-box-mix as I feared, and I did enjoy it enough that it wins a spot in the Bronze tier of my Best of the Year list.
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