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Upon seeing the cover of this book in my school's library I
was instantly drawn to it and as I am a lover of fantasy, a blurb that had
hints of magic was enough for me to take it with full force.
This is the first book by Alyxandra Harvey that I've read
and at first I was very concerned with where the book was going. It seemed to
me that for the first fifty pages or so nothing was particularly clear and
although I could tell that the author had some great ideas, they failed to make
it onto the page in a way that suited someone who had only just entered that
world. However I can look back, knowing what I know from later on in the book,
and say that it could represent how the cousins were feeling, but as an
introduction to the trilogy, I was not overly impressed.
As I got further into the story I grew to be very interested
in it, so much so that I finished it far earlier than I thought I would. This
book is different to others about witchcraft because of how witchcraft was
presented (the sides of good and evil and hierarchy within the witching
community) and because of the time period it was set in. The early 1800s is
actually a time period that I have rarely discovered through books, so this was
a nice taster.
Emma, Gretchen and Penelope were characters that I
especially liked because of their resilience to conform to what society
expected of them. It is something that in today's society wouldn't be frowned
upon, but in that time it was very rare and it made me so happy to have main
characters who wanted to be different. Although, I am led to question whether
any girls at that time did act as they did because of punishments that would
have been brought about as a result of their actions.
In a way I did not like the fact that from the start of the
novel I, as the reader, knew that Emma and Cormac were going to end up
together. Their romance was a sweet forbidden one, but it was so plainly
obvious from the first page that I was almost uninterested in it. It felt like
it was a doomed relationship rather than a destined one.
I have to commend Harvey on her presentation of Daphne
because I believed what Emma, Gretchen and Penelope did about her. I was so
caught up in their presumptions that I didn't notice that she could be any
different from how they thought her to be. From the beginning of the book she
was believed to be a villain in a ball gown, but as the story progressed we got
to see more and more of who she truly was. It is character development like
that that I try and find in every novel.
On the other side of Emma's high class society was that of
Moira and her companions. Her life of living on rooftops and stealing to make
her way by is not one that I haven't heard of before, but it was made
intriguing by her affinity with magic, the things she had had to suffer through
and her connection with the other protagonists. I would really like to look
more into her past and see what else lies beneath her surface and what has made
her become her.
Flashbacks are often a fickle thing, but I think they were
handled well. There were not so many that I was overwhelmed by them, yet not so
little that I lost interest in the characters that they focused on. The story
of Theodora could be written into a book of its own, but at this point I feel
it is necessary for Emma to be in the dark about some things. I would
definitely like to know more about her life in the books to come though.
As you can easily tell from the blurb, there was death in
this book and it think that there were just the right amount of deaths and they
were people that I, as the reader, knew well enough to feel sorry about, but
not so much that I started to hate the author for killing off one of my
favourite characters. That balance was just right in this book.
My only real complaint about this novel, apart from the
unclear start, is the grammar. I think I will have to stop writing this in my
reviews soon because it seems that no one else cares about the matter, but I
will never accept connectives being used as sentence starters in the middle of
narration. It is really saddening to see again and again and it seems that
everyone has just accepted it to be correct now.
Overall I really enjoyed this book and can't wait to read
the next! Luckily no one had taken in from the school's library when I got it
out this morning or I would have been a bit vexed.
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