Customer Reviews

Witchling (Sisters of the Moon)

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Attempt at a witty review title aside I think it conveys my overall opinion pretty well. If you love paranormals with heroines akin to Buffy or the Halliwell sisters this is right up your alley. Any comparison to literary heroines would bring those gals down just a little.

Meet the D'Artigo sisters, mom was a human, dad is fae. Oldest sister Camille, a witch, tells this first story. Operatives for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency they are the protectors of the line between Otherworld (their home realm) and Earth. When a baddy from the Subterranean Realms threatens to upset the balance between the three realms Camille and sisters Delilah, a shapeshifter, and Menolly, a vampire, have to kick some bad guy butt. Throw in the rich setting of the Pacific Northwest and some hot guys to keep the lust tension going and you have the perfect light reading.

While not quite as well built, planned and plotted as other heroines in the genre don't count these girls out. Characters like Rachel Morgan or Mercy Thompson are the caloric equivalent of a regular cola and these would make a great diet substitute. Lighter reading for in between the meatier series's. Enjoy!

Three sisters, half human, half fae work for the Otherworld Investigative Services and are stationed in Seattle.

The good: The worldbuilding is excellent. Full blooded humans (FBH) live side by side with creatures from the Other World including, but not limited to giants, sidthe, cryptos, weres and vampires. Unlike most paranormal books the author makes an effort to make the sidthe, weres and vampires different than humans. FBHs are both facinated and repulsed by the recently revealed fae, some gawk and other protest the fae's presence on earth. The unrest in the Other World is completely believable as is the demon's desire to invade Earth and the Other World.

The bad: Although the relationships between the sisters is believable and the cast of characters is enjoyable, the relationship between Camille and her boyfriends is not. I found it impossible to believe that after six years of celibacy she would take two lovers, and consider a third, in the course of one week. Also the story is set up so that Camille's magic shorts out, but it always seems to happen in the most helpful manner.

In my opinion the book is misclassified. It is paranormal or urban fantasy, not a paranormal romance. There is no relationship resolution and to be honest the romantic entanglements are the least important part of the story. For those looking for a romance novel, this isn't for you. For those looking to start a new Urban Fantasy series, I can definately recommend Witchling.

Where to start? This unoriginal book is an attempt to cash in on the rising popularity of urban paranormal fantasy (done well by authors like Laurell K. Hamilton or Jim Butcher) but falls way, way short. Nothing is believable, not the characters (who all talk exactly the same - like a teenager, from the human to the ancient dragon), the relationships, or the setting itself. There's a huge lack of successful world-building here. But the absolute worst thing would have to be the dialogue. I can't say how many times I wanted to toss this book for the trite and cheesy dialogue alone. If a friend had given me this book asking if I thought it could be published, I would have said absolutely not. Yet here it is, and people are actually giving it good reviews??? I wouldn't even expect bad young adult fiction to be THIS bad. (I like YA fiction.)

Other examples of bad writing: a couple of the bad guys' names are "Bad A** Luke" and "The Psycho Babbler". The book is always understating or overstating things - characters laugh at inappropriate times and I can't even count how many times the main character "shakes" herself every time she has a [gasp] thought. Even a couple gratuitous sex scenes couldn't save this book. One of my favorite examples of awful writing... "My arm burned like a mother-sucker." Direct quote, no editing on my part.

The sad thing is that I actually wanted to like this book. Galenorn writes good pagan nonfiction. Sadly, she should stick with that. Big time pass on this series - I won't be reading the others. The only reason I finished it was because it was a gift. If I'd stopped after 30 pages like I wanted to, I would have settled on 2 stars for effort, but after slogging through this waste of paper, I'm giving it 1 for my suffering.

There's nothing better on a cold winter day than a cup of steaming cocoa and a good book. WITCHLING definitely qualifies as a good book--one of the best of 2006. And if reading about Camille D'Artigo and her sisters' exploits doesn't get your blood pumping, well you'd better watch out because Menolly might want a snack. (She's very neat about it, though.)

The book is set in contemporary greater Seattle area and features the three D'Artigo sisters who are half human and half fae. Each has a special gift although because they're half-bloods, their gifts aren't exactly reliable. Camille is a witch, Delilah shapeshifts to a kitty, and Menolly is a vamp. The sisters work for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency and must find another operative's murderer. But when the murderer turns into three--demons, that is, things get a little exciting. I really don't want to say much about the plot because each chapter is a discovery, and the reader will want to make that discovery himself.

Who doesn't like murder, suspense, dragons, demons, and a baby gargoyle, all mixed in with a good dose of humor? WITCHLING is an exciting, compelling read. The worldbuilding is incredible and the characters are spellbinding, no pun intended. I heartily recommend this book and am eagerly looking forward to the next in the Sisters of the Moon series, CHANGELING.

I can only think that anyone who would give this book more than two stars must really be lacking in both imagination and intelligence.

Galenorn violates the first rule of writing which is "Show, Don't Tell" to such a degree that she would be better off peddling it as a "How NOT to Write" book. Every insignificant detail is spelled out, and the dialogue is so forced and repetitive that the characters seem mentally challenged. The main character, Camille, comes off schizophrenic because Galenorn can't seem to decide if she's the good-natured bumbler whose magic is erratic at best, or if she's the serious, sexy, hardass who gets things done... and she flips back and forth until you have no idea why the character says or does anything.

This lack of continuity extends to the plot as well, which often seems contrived. For instance, the identity and motivation of the book's villain is discovered early on when Camille pays a visit to "Grandmother Coyote" who flat-out tells her what's going on and that she must find a man who lives in the area (how convenient)... even giving her the man's full name (so helpful). Then she and her sisters spend the next couple DAYS saying how bad (world-destroying even)the situation is while twiddling their thumbs with seemingly no idea of how to even begin to look for this guy. Really?? They could locate the magical Grandmother Coyote but the exact location of a single human man stumps them? And what about their detective/cop friend? Meanwhile, the fate of the world is at stake, but the main character is lingerie shopping, and it takes two days to decide to actually go to the area where the guy they need to find lives?! Again... REALLY?!

Even when a book is bad, I try to read the whole thing... maybe it will redeem itself, right? But, on this one, I gave up at the halfway point... yep, right in the middle when most stories should be at their most interesting. That alone should tell you how bad it is.

There aren't many books that I start and don't finish. This may well be the first such that I've taken the time to review. A friend of mine got a copy of Yasmine Galenorn's Witchling as a white elephant gift at a Yule celebration, from a young man who told us that he started reading her Wicca 101; she warned me that it was bad, but my other reading project - Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead - had proven too meaty for bedtime reading, and I was looking to chillax. It's not like I don't have a place in my heart for trashy urban fantasy.

The writing is just plain bad. All semester I was chastised by my lit professor for my refusal to "embrace the marginalia", to mark in the books. Reading Witchling I very nearly grabbed a red pen for striking extraneous transitions and adverbs. There's not so much exposition as there is ill-timed info-dumping. The book is so full of pop culture references, that even as someone from the time and place where the book was written, I find many of the references to be incomprehensible. It's like the book never saw an editor ... maybe not even a private test audience.

The story revolves around three sisters, half human and half Faerie, whose mixed-blood heritage causes their Faerie magic and power to fail at random. The eldest sister is a witch, disdainful of human Wiccans and Pagans and of full-blooded humans (called "FBHs"by the otherworldly characters) in general. The middle sister is a were-cat whose her animal form is a striped tabby. The third was a "natural acrobat" with Spiderman-like wall climbing powers ... until they failed and dropped her into a nest of vampires, who turned her. Although not particularly original, the characters had the potential to be interesting. That potential was wasted.

The characters work for the OIA - the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. That's right, Faerieland has an intelligence agency. A bureaucratic one, that puts its agents up in hovels and uses tacky gift shops as fronts, that hires loser humans who are essentially fanboys of the magical community, whose chief purpose seems to be a foil for longwinded exposition. Rather than living in an OIA hovel, the sisters live in an old Victorian mansion - a thirty minute commute outside of Seattle, which is apparently a very long drive in the mind of Yasmine Galenorn. The sisters have this mansion, and legal identities in the United States, because their mother insisted that they get Social Security numbers ... except that their mother left earth during World War II, and children weren't commonly given Social Security numbers until the 1980s when the tax law was changed so that you couldn't claim an unnumbered child as a deduction.

The story opens with a new assignment: the characters must investigate the death of Jocko the iant. Yes: Jocko the giant. Who, at over seven feet, is a dwarf giant. Who has a giant penis and likes to have sex with human women. He was killed by a demon - the characters can tell, because they can smell it on the rope that killed him. There's a new demon lord in hell - "Shadow Wing", seriously? - about whom the characters (who spend a lot of time telling us, the reader, that they're peons) mysteriously know more than the OIA. A seer tells the main character that Shadow Wing is a soul eater ... as if that were something rare and unique, rather than a staple of both the genre in particular and mythology as a whole.

Although there's big trouble afoot, the oldest sister takes a night off to take her youngest sister to a Vampires Anonymous meeting. Yes. VA.

After the VA meeting, the oldest sister goes to meet the seer who will tell her about the coming troubles ... but not before taking a few moments to fantasize about an ex and decide that, no, she doesn't have time to masturbate. Yes, I've had days like that. But they don't make good fiction. So instead she gets dressed in special Faerie clothes that won't get caught on the underbrush.

The seer is an "Elemental", one of the "Hags of Fate", an immortal who lives near a portal outside of town and outside the control of the OIA (explain to me how a few miles outside of town is beyond the reach of the Otherworld authorities?). She reads the character's heart, issues a prophesy, and demands a price: the finger bone of a demon or her own finger if she can't find one. The seer would be a solid character ... except that Galenorn named her "Grandmother Coyote".

The MC's ex is a "Svartan", from Svartalfheim, and although I made it a little bit past this reveal, this is where the book really lost me. If he he were actually a Svartalf it wouldn't be so bad: smithfolk from the darkest depths of the Norse world, and about whom very few specifics remain. They're black-skinned, mysterious, borderline evil, and the narrator actually says "once you go Svartan, you never go back." Essentially, they're a magically endowed disaster of racial stereotypes about black people.

I wanted to make it to the end and catalogue all the fail, but I just couldn't hack it. I gave up at the top of page 58. Do not even attempt to read this book without a bong in one hand and a glass of cheep wine in the other.

After reading this book, I felt this book was just ok but certainly nothing I would want to re-read or keep.

The story is about 3 sisters that are half human and half fae. One sister is a witch w/ powers that are on the fritz sometimes because of her halfing status, one sister has recently become a vampire, and the third sister can change shape into a tabby cat. This story is in the witch sister perspective.

There are 4 main issues w/ the book.

The first one being that I felt like I had read the characters in her books in other books. For instance, the witch has an intense love interest dark elf, I couldn't help thinking of Jet Mykels dark elves. She also has a second love interest that is a fox demon that reminds me of Morgan Hawke's fox demon. Then the third possible love interest is an albino shapeshifting dragon that reminded me of Gena Showalter's Atlantis's dragons. I guess the whole non-monogomous thing was a big turn off for me. It's difficult for me to think of the story as a romance when there are multiple love interest.

The second issue I had w/ the book was the various different species. I noticed that this is a trend in that many authors are using as world building like Kresley Cole's valkyeries series, Gena Showalter's Altantis series, Nora Robert's Circle Trilogy, Eileen Wilks series, or Marjorie Liu's series. Some authors can carry off the variety of different species, but I think in general it's confusing and at some point it gets to be ridculous. Goblins, faires, elves, fox demons, fae, dark elves, banshees, witches, vampires, jaguar demons, gargoyles, necromancers, and etc. There were plenty of more species as well. To many different characters distract a reader on the plot w/ all the explanation given about the various species, which leads me to my third issue w/ the book.

The first person perspective didn't bother like some readers, but the story telling did not flow for me. Camille, the witch, spent to many pages explaining the lifestyle, the organization she was in, the world she is in, her sister's problems and etc that I didn't get much personality form Camille other than her lust for other men and her love for her sisters. Not enough character development or explanation on why being born half human causes backfires sometimes or how her own powers work.

The fourth isssue I had w/ the book were the villain naming conventions. How can you take the villains seriously when the bad guy is named something like Bad Ass Luke, or Psyho Babble or some such?

The overall plot would have worked better if the story flowed better rather than Camille doing something then gathering her sisters for another thing and then Camille doing something w/ her gathering her sisters again. That got to be repetative. The story is about fae court gone selfish and uncaring of its people, another world trying to take over, and to do that they require 9 seals (I guess this leaves the door open for a 9 book series.) So Camille tries to find the seals before the bad guys do, while dealing w/ the beaurcratic nature of her organization, anti-fae humans picketing her book store, a constant deluge of human fans wanting her picture and autograph, forcing her sister to attend a Vampire Anonymous session, ignoring her human organization friend from hitting on her, dealing w/ her multiple love interest, using her wacked powers, and etc. Now that I think about it, the story has too much going on for the story to be smooth.

I may buy the second book about the tabby cat shape changing sister just to see if the writing style has improved. But I wouldn't say this story is a must read for anyone nor will it go on the keeper shelf. It's not exactly bad, but not great either.

I thought this book would be good. It had promise. But was I mistaken. I got 50 pages into this book then had to put it down. I wanted to stop after the 15th page, but i thought it might get better- never happened. The book just full of stereotypes- the Werecat lapped milk out of a glass, while in human form, and caught mice. There were also all these terms that lacked originality and were sometimes confusing. And occasionally, I'd pick up the book, read a couple pages, and get the feeling I had read this before- in another book. A lot of this book I don't understand, like how they can look so different but be related, or why the vampire was like every other vampire you read in folklore.

I'm sorry, but I have read better.

Read this book, despite the next line of my review! This book was not the greatest, but not bad at all. Like others, I had a problem with the sisters not immediately trying to find the guy with the seal. But, don't let this stop you from reading this series, which just get's better and better. Think of this book as the introduction, as this is where you are getting to know the family and meet some of the characters that will mean much more in later books. Just see the reviews for the rest of the series and you will see what I mean. The next book was much better and every book since has been fantastic.

Each book is written from a different sisters perspective. One is a Witch, one a Were Kitty and one a Vampire, all half fae and half human. They start out as misfits who are not accepted in either world. Their powers are weak and unreliable at best, but as the stories progress, these girls become very powerful, each in their own unique way. They form strong alliances and caring friendships while kicking evil demonkind butt. They acquire a large extended family of misfits that make the stories even more engaging. Through it all, the sisters have an unbreakable bond between them.

Someone talked about how much of a let down this book was after reading Kim Harrison. Let me tell you that I think this series is even better than Kim Harrison's. I just don't feel the connections between the characters in Kim's books. In this series, you really feel the emotions between all the characters. They go into battle together and kick serious butt. A group of ragtag, yet powerful misfits become a close knit family.

This is one series you really don't want to miss.

I loved this book! The first few chapters were a little slow, but soon I found myself totally emersed in the world the author had created. The only thing that even slightly disappoints me is that it will be told from a different sister in each book. I loved Camille and the men in her life (especially a certain dragon !!) and I would love to find out more from her point of view. Still, I cannot WAIT for the next one.