Product Description

Holly Cathers's world shatters when her parents are killed in a terrible accident. Wrenched from her home in San Francisco, she is sent to Seattle to live with her relatives, Aunt Marie-Claire and her twin cousins, Amanda and Nicole.

In her new home, Holly's sorrow and grief soon give way to bewilderment at the strange incidents going on around her. Such as how any wish she whispers to her cat seems to come true. Or the way a friend is injured after a freak attack from a vicious falcon. And there's the undeniable, magnetic attraction to a boy Holly barely knows.

Holly, Amanda, and Nicole are about to be launced into a dark legacy of witches, secrets, and alliances, where ancient magics yield dangerous results. The girls will assume their roles in an intergenerational feud beyond their wildest imaginations...and in doing so, will attempt to fulfill their shared destiny.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18232 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416971191
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Best-selling author Nancy Holder has published sixty books and more than two hundred short stories. She has received four Bram Stoker awards for fiction from the Horror Writers Association, and her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. She has written or cowritten twenty Buffy and Angel projects. A graduate of the University of California at San Diego, Nancy is currently a writing teacher at the school. She lives in San Diego with her daughter, Belle, and their growing assortment of pets.

Debbie Vigui - holds a degree in creative writing from UC Davis. Her Simon Pulse books include the Wicked series, co-authored with Nancy Holder, and the Once upon a Time novels SCARLET MOON and MIDNIGHT PEARLS. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Scott. Visit her at www.debbieviguie.com.

Customer Reviews

It lost me towards the end of book 2
This book started out ok. With many characters and motivations it had a lot of potential. The first book was a good introduction... lots of action, star-crossed lovers, evil bad guys to destroy. But, in the second book (this book is two in one), the story begins to unravel. The main character, Holly, loses momentum in the second book. Her story line just seems to plod along. One of the secondary characters, Nicole, is actually far more interesting in this book.

The second book lost me when Holly did something VERY out of character. ***SPOILER ALERT*** She kills an animal that loves and trusts her with absolutely no emotion and little cause or motivation.*** SPOILER OVER*** It's not the act itself that bothers me as much as the fact that it was way out of character. Nothing led up to her making such a deviation from what she would normally do. The story was ruined for me after that. :( It may pick up and get better, but integrity of characterization is the most important part of a story for me.

I truly tried to like this, BUT...
...I just couldn't. The story is related in a disjointed manner, skipping from the main present-day storyline to ancient history which could have been incorporated in a much more entertaining way. The lead characters are unsympathetic, having no real depth and only seeming to perform their actions because the authors tell them to do so, not from any aspect of real personality. At times I found myself rooting for the villain, Michael Deveraux, who is unfortunately the most fleshed-out character in the whole series, and the only one who seems to have an idea of what he really wants. As for the lead trio of witches, Holly is what people her age would call "a hot mess", unstable and overly impulsive, hardly leadership material; Nicole metamorphoses from egocentric to whiny, and her fleeing to Europe when she's most needed is a frankly stupid plot device to make the story even more soap-opera, which it hardly needs; and Amanda I can't define, as after reading about 700 pages I still don't know anything about her-- the cats are better characterized. I can't really even enjoy this on the level of soap-opera, as the romance is contrived and has no real basis or tension. I am aware that Holly and Jer are supposed to be instantly attracted to each other as the reincarnations of the long-dead lovers, but their relationship has no personal level at all and feels very much acted out by puppets. While I don't like writing such a relentlessly negative review of anything, I honestly can't think of anything I liked about this book, and haven't disliked a book so much before (especially when I wanted to like it so much, as the subject matter was so appealing) that I had to write about it to get it off my chest. This series had a lot of potential, but all the potential is wasted-- it just feels phoned in. The authors don't even bother to keep their characters in character, and the lack of description as well as the constant juxtaposition of time periods makes the story muddled and difficult to follow. I was disappointed, to say the least-- this series could have been SO much more.

More Adult and less young adult.
I say more adult because there are many characters and the book does a lot of jumping around. There is nothing sexual about this book and no real ending to the story. It was interesting to read if you could keep up. But it was a real let down in the end no big finish or anything and a lot of unfinished business. I hope the sequal is better.