Tags

, , , , , , ,

Solid witchy YA about three teen girls, all with their own connections to witchcraft, who get drawn into a series of murders of women who also have magical involvements.

From the author of New York Times bestseller House of Hollow comes a darkly seductive witchy thriller where, though both men and demons lurk in shadows, girls refuse to go quietly into the night.

Zara Jones believes in magic because the alternative is too painful to bear—that her sister was murdered by a serial killer and there is precisely nothing she can do to change it. If there’s anything Zara cannot stand it’s feeling powerless, so she decides she will do whatever it takes—even if that means partaking in the occult—to bring her sister back from the dead.
Jude Wolf might be the daughter of a billionaire, but she is also undeniably cursed. After a deal with a demon went horribly wrong, her soul is now slowly turning necrotic. Flowers and insects die in her wake and monstrous things come to taunt her at night. If Jude can’t find the right someone to fix her mistake, she fears she’ll die very soon.
Enter Emer Bryne: the solution to both Zara and Jude’s predicaments. The daughter of a witch, Emer sells spells to women in desperate situations willing to sacrifice a part of their soul in exchange for a bit of power, a bit of magic to change their lives. But Emer has a dark past all her own—and as her former clients are murdered one-by-one, she knows it’s followed her all the way to London.
As Zara and Jude enter Emer’s orbit, they’ll have to team up to stop the killer—before they each end up next on his list.

I enjoyed the characters, especially Jude, but I have to say that the cover doesn’t fit their vibes at all. Both Jude and Emer are, haircolour aside, described completely different than the artist is portraying them, which is a bit disappointing. I also wouldn’t say that Jude is the central character at all.

While I enjoyed Jude the most, I think Emer was the most central to the story. It’s her around which everything develops, she is at the enter of everything, though of course all three girls are involved. If anything, Zara felt a bit like the odd one out, both in motive and due to the dynamic that develops between the others.

I wish the book had had a bit more lore about the magic and witches, about how it ties in with history, as well as the culture and exact definitions of all the terms. Despite me using the term “witch” a lot, it’s not used super much in the book, if when it is, it never is quite clear what it really describes. The titual invocations are deals with demons that leave marks on the skin, and the women with those marks seem to be witches – even though they themselves have no “magic” per see outside of the deal they have made. And they didn’t even make the invocation themselves, needing a third party to make it for them.

I did have a good time reading this, but it doesn’t take long to find plotholes or inconsistencies when thinking about this book. Not necessaily a bad thing, I really liked how things fit together in the end, but it wasn’t the most neatly packaged up plot.

Check out the book here.

~iam