strange and random happenstance

Speak of the Devil by Sweeney Boo
Published by: HarperAlley
Publication Date: March 3rd, 2026
Format: Hardcover, 240 Pages
Rating: ★★
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At the Younwity Hidden Institute of Witchcraft life has not returned to normal since the events that transpired a month earlier on Samhain. Since the botany professor was exposed and sent to prison along with the headmistress. The Coven now has security stationed at the school due to the geological and magical ramifications from Lilith's Samhain ritual of dark spell crafting. A magical fissure that has formed is most likely the cause of all that is wrong at Younwity. Ghosts are off, doorways aren't stationary, there's rain in the dining hall, and great cracks are appearing throughout the building with every tremor that rattles the bones. Because the student body doesn't know the truth about what happened on Samhain they are blaming poor Noreen. Noreen who was a victim of Lilith and who saved the day. She's now ridiculed and scorned. Plus she's suffering from sleepwalking and nightmares. The school has locked her in the highest tower and hopes that her problems will resolve themselves, or at the very least wait until after the fissure is sealed to be addressed. This isn't good enough for Abby. She still feels guilty she wasn't looking out for Noreen enough as her mentor. Which means that Abby is trying to seal the fissure. Sure the Coven has brought in one of their own, Cora Perenell, who specializes in sealing magic, but she appears to be making no headway, in fact the fissure is expanding. Which is why Abby has to succeed. Thankfully she has the help of her friends. But it's getting more and more dangerous for Abby to sneak out at night, let alone create a diversion to get near enough to the fissure. Her latest attempt seems to be succeeding when she's interrupted. Noreen's primary bullies, Cabnus and Rupert, followed Abby to prove that her and her friends are behind everything. Only because of their intrusion Rupert is drawn to the fissure and disappears into it. This is obviously next level bad. So of course the school will want to keep a lid on it. Unfortunately the school's incipient journalist, Atlas Hewett, was on hand to witness the whole debacle. He quite recently realized that wherever Abby and her friends are is where the story is. Which means that Abby has another problem to deal with. At least there's the oblivion of sleep. Or there used to be until she gets what is clearly a prophetic dream. So now Abby and her friends have to seal the fissure, clear Noreen's name, and figure out why Abby is dreaming about the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1652. A family named Younwity tried to flee Newdory because of the peril of the witchfinder. Aurora and her three children, Diana, Lucius, and Magdalena, summoned the sisterhood, but if Abby's visions are anything to go by, they were too late. Could the past be what is leaking through the fissure to the present? And how dangerous can a powerless witch be?

This second volume in Sweeney Boo's Over My Dead Body series was a chance for her to take the series beyond being just Harry Potter FanFic and really make it her own and she just named a character Lucius. OK, deep breath, moving beyond Harry Potter, time for invisibility cloaking spells. Well, that is a choice. Oh, a hack journalist who has a "niffler" for a familiar!?! Yeah. No. Mole my ass. The point was to move beyond Harry Potter, to form a world of her own making, not just jump ahead a few books in the Harry Potter series to where everything is dark and there's Dumbledore's Army. Even if she wanted to do this just skipping ahead doesn't work because we didn't build to this point and that means the infodump was gigantic. The first book centered on four students and four faculty members, within the first few pages of Speak of the Devil we have an historical family of five who are all important, then in the present there's seven new students of import and two adults. At two-hundred and forty pages this is not a lot of time to develop a story and almost trebling the cast just bogs the narrative down. Throw in horrible Charmed worthy rhyming spells and a "haunting" song from the past that is drawn over the art in the ugliest pink font I've ever seen, and this story, for whatever it's worth within the sphere of Harry Potter FanFic, just feels cheap. Which we, as readers, know is not the case. It's obvious this took years to draw but therein I also have a problem. The style of the art has changed. While an artist's style will never remain consistent, they will change and grow, it's perhaps best if they don't regress. Reading these two volumes back to back you'd expect a little more consistency, but Sweeney Boo's style has changed so much that I felt annoyed looking at this new volume. All the characters had this flatness to their features now. They literally look as if they've been hit in the face with a frying pan. It's disconcerting. But it's nothing to the fact that when the characters are shown in profile the lower portion of their face around the mouth is distorted outward, almost as if they were drawn transforming into a werewolf. Which, for the record, they weren't. Instead you have this weird, unrealistic, beaver profile with a flatness viewed head-on. In the first volume they looked cartoonish but obviously based on humans. Here, they no longer look human. Each and every character is off-putting in their own special way. Though at least messing up the human form and flattening features to make it look like Monkey Christ is something that's happened before. Just look to Cecilia Giménez. Outlining every single character with vibrant color as if they all have a magical aura makes no artistic sense. Even Monkey Christ didn't get a halo. This book needed to narrow its focus to the history of the foundlings and their connection to Diana Younwity thus creating it's own mythology while maintaining the look of the previous volume. None of this came to pass. Sadly.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Abby Younwity, Charmed, Dark Academia, Fanfiction, Graphic Novel, Harry Potter, Infodump, Massachusetts, Monkey Christ, Niffler, Noreen Younwity, Over My Dead Body, Season of the Witch, Speak of the Devil, Sweeney Boo, Witchfinder

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Published by: Berkley
Publication Date: July 1st, 1995
Format: Kindle, 290 Pages
Rating: ★★
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Sally and Gillian Owens's upbringing has been far from normal. Orphaned at a young age they moved to Massachusetts to live with their aunts. Their house on Magnolia Street is where the desperate women of the town came to get what they most desire. Love can be bought, but at what cost? Sally is determined to have a normal life and looks for any sign that her aunts are nothing but charlatans. Sadly, she sees no such evidence and the insults hurled at her and Gillian are, in Sally's mind, nothing but the cruel truth. As time passes the insults of the other children turn to intrigue. Gillian starts turning heads. But they have been warned by their aunts. Love isn't in the cards if you are an Owens. Two young boys they dearly cared for were struck by lightning on the town green and it has become part of the allure to the womenfolk at their door. Yet love will find a way. Gillian elopes and is already done with her first marriage when she's barely out of high school. And then Sally falls. Hard. Michael and her and their two daughters, Kylie and Antonia, live with the aunts on Magnolia Street. The town embraces them. Everything is perfect until some kids are out joyriding and hit and kill Michael. Sally does not speak for a year. Her only connection to the world is a weekly phone call with her sister. After the year is up Sally packs up her daughters and moves out. For eleven years she did the right thing. For eleven years her daughters were raised in a stable home environment with only one week of excess in August with the aunts in Massachusetts. And then Gillian returns. She hasn't been east of the Mississippi since she first crossed it all those years ago. She's in trouble. Big trouble. She's brought Jimmy. Jimmy is dead. He was abusive and dangerous and she was just trying to give herself a little bit of a break and, well, she killed him with poison. She really didn't mean it to be fatal. But here she is, east of the Mississippi and asking her sister for help. They bury him under the lilac. Lilacs aren't supposed to bloom in July, but these are. And that's not the only unnatural occurrence. As Gillian inserts herself into her sister's life she creates an enemy in Kylie and an ally in Antonia. Kylie is further enraged by Gillian's courtship of her favorite teacher, Ben Frye. As the girls start to turn into young women and Sally and Gillian cope with their past one thing is certain, time might be running out. Because a man like Jimmy doesn't disappear without someone noticing. And that someone could be dangerous to Sally and her heart. Luckily whenever things get too bad at least you can call in the aunts. They are the best reinforcements anyone can ask for.

Practical Magic is a cultural phenomenon. The movie that is. I can't count the number of times that I have watched it. In college I took a set design class and one of my teacher's former students had worked on the film so he had oodles of pictures of the set to share with us. I remember sitting in that darkened classroom and dreaming of living in the Owens's house. Because, let's be honest, anyone who has ever watched this film wants that house. In fact one of my friends was devastated to learn that the house was a facade with the interiors on a sound stage elsewhere. She needed to believe that the house was out there and she could one day show up and move in. I pointed out that she could always build a replica but she insists it's not the same. This is how strong people feel about this movie. They are destroyed if the curtain is lifted on the mundane realities that went into making it. They want to believe in the magic. As did I. Though I would be totally fine with a replica for your information if anyone wanted to build me one. I love this movie so much that of course I wanted to read the book. But first I had to find the exact copy I was willing to read. I needed the tie-in edition with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman on the cover with witches silhouetted over the moon. Once I found it, I read it, and I hated it for not being the movie. I quickly sold that edition I had spent so much time to acquire and vowed never to look back. With the second movie coming out I decided to give the book a second chance. I was going to read it and try not to draw comparisons between it and the beloved film it became. I was going to let it stand on it's own. As you can probably guess, that was never going to work. I love the film too much. But I was able to go back in knowing how different it was and to try to judge it on it's own merits. So, how is the book on it's own? I hate all the characters. They're all unpleasant and miserable. What's more, the focus on Sally's teenage daughters makes the book too full of teenage angst. Teenage angst that even Gillian hasn't grown out of despite being a thirty something year old woman. Stop acting like a lovestruck teen! Grow up! Everything about you pisses me off. Oh, and your ex Jimmy? Alice Hoffman was channeling Anne Rice's Lasher big time. It was actually a bit disconcerting. Though the failing of this book is more in how it's told than what's told, so it's all on Alice Hoffman's writing. It's written in a weird leaping omniscient narration so you don't know who is being referred to. And as a reader of Terry Pratchett I'm used to books without chapters because life doesn't happen in chapters, but having four sections in an almost three hundred page book with no natural breaks is off-putting and at times grueling. The style is trying to be too lyrical and is just dripping with purple prose. Here's an idea, let the characters speak for themselves instead of describing everything in the tiniest detail while also confusing the heck out of your readers. So yeah, this book wasn't for me, but at least I can say I dislike it for itself instead of hating it for what it isn't.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adaptation, Alice Hoffman, Angst, Anne Rice, Cult Classic, Gillian Owens, Lasher, Massachusetts, Movie, Narration, Nichole Kidman, Practical Magic, Purple Prose, Sally Owens, Sandra Bullock, Season of the Witch, Teenagers, Witches

Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: October 6th, 2020
Format: Hardcover, 416 Pages
Rating: ★
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"Fate is what you make of it, Hannah had told her. You can make the best of it, or you can let it make the best of you." In 1664 in Essex County, England, Hannah Owens found a baby guarded by a crow in a frozen field. She took the girl in and named her Maria. The crow, obviously the young babe's familiar, was named Cadin. They spent ten years together in the woods, Hannah teaching Maria the Nameless Art. Though for Hannah witchery was a choice, for Maria it was not. She was born to it. They tended to the locals and Hannah would never turn away a woman in need. On the day Maria's mother returned begging for help, Hannah didn't turn her away. It would be her death. Rebecca was a selfish creature, working a dangerous spell, Love Potion #10, to entrap her husband. Now Rebecca wishes to rid herself of her husband and run off with Maria's father. The spell is so strong she is unable to work the magic herself to quench her husband's fire. While Hannah helps release her, the love of Thomas Lockland turns to rage. He hunts his wife down. Maria escapes with her life, Hannah does not. Maria turns to her mother, now relieved of her husband due to injuries sustained in the attack. Rebecca shows her powerful and dangerous spells before she flees with Maria's father. A father who pays for Maria to leave England by selling her to the Jansen family in Curaçao. The island off the coast of Venezuela is unlike anything she ever imagined. She is dutiful in her work and develops a reputation for helping the women of the island. Too bad she can't help herself. When she is fifteen John Hathorne comes to the island to do business with Mr. Jansen. He is her fate. She saw it in a mirror years earlier. For five days they live in a world of their own making. On the sixth day, the thirty-seven year old man is gone. When she realizes she is with child she starts to make plans to seek him out. He lives in the other Essex County, the one across the sea from where she was born. She will travel there when she is able. On March 20th, 1680, Maria gives birth to Faith and in August they book passage aboard a pirate ship bound for Rhode Island. She was only able to convince the captain, Abraham Dias, by promising to save his son, Samuel, who is dying of breakbone fever. The two forge a strong connection, but she views it as her destiny to reunite with John Hathorne. But Essex County is a big place and she's in Boston for months before she hears of him in Salem. She, Faith, and a belligerent Cadin, head off in search of this man. A woman like Maria isn't welcome in Salem. She thinks for herself and wears red boots. She doesn't know the customs or the costume appropriate for women. Yet a shocked John strings her along. He has more secrets that she knows and they will be her downfall and the rise of a curse. One that will lead any man who ever loves an Owens to be broken in body and soul. One that could destroy the happiness of future generations unless they are able to break it. Unless they make the best of fate.

That this book actually has good characters and good ideas gave me hope. That this book then squandered all that is an affront and a grievance to all those who bothered to finish it. Magic Lessons is drawn out almost beyond human endurance. The constant repetition made this feel like a first draft. Because either this book should have been tighter or split in two. The stories of Maria and her daughter Faith feel diminished by sharing the same pages. Especially once Faith turns to the left. I can't put my finger on where exactly this book went wrong, but just like Faith, it became rotten. I didn't want to pick it up again once I put it down. I just wanted to be done with it. And yet, I am a completest and therefore I trudged through this word salad to inform you about the one thing you're wondering about this book, do we learn the details of the Owens Curse? Yes. We do. Though it's far more human and stupid than you can imagine involving the follies of youth combined with rage. The fact that Maria doesn't think about her actions in the moment and even when she does assumes that in three hundred years someone is bound to figure it out, made me strongly dislike her in the end. These are her descendants, she builds a home for them, and figures that they can just stumble through the horrible legacy she left them in a moment of blind rage? Sure. Nice one Maria. But then again you were seduced and impregnated by the thirty-seven year old man when you were a fifteen-year-old servant. You don't have the best judgement. And Alice Hoffman just had to make Maria's backstory with John Hathorne that much creepier. She didn't lose the love of her life, she lost a letch who momentarily let his desires take control. But then again he also married a fourteen-year-old in real life. And given the average age of marriage back then was nineteen, that's just sick and creepy. Yet that's not the worst age-related crime in this book. Alice Hoffman has this tendency to have children that are overly precocious. I actually call this "The Charles Wallace Problem," named after the five-year-old younger brother of Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time. The last time I read that book I was spending the summer with my friend who has three children. At the time one of them was five. So I know full well how five-year-old children behave. And Charles Wallace is not it. Alice Hoffman extends this to all her characters when they are children. Maria can remember being left in a field right after her birth, Faith remembers full pages of her mother's grimoire that she glimpsed as a child, and this even goes back to the first book in this series when Sally was four and handling the Aunts over the phone and organizing plane tickets after her parents deaths. This isn't normal! I know that this book has magic, but this is beyond magic, it's just illogical. And yet that wasn't what broke me. Before we've only ever known that the house on Magnolia Street was in Massachusetts. This makes it very clear that it is in Salem. AKA Witch City. And yet the Owens are viewed as odd outcasts and Sally and Gillian are bullied as children for their weirdness? I understand the bullying, I don't understand the outcast status for being witches. They are literally in the city known for it. I just can't.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Wrinkle in Time, Alice Hoffman, Charles Wallace, Curse, Essex County, Faith Owens, Familiars, Fate, John Hathorne, Magic Lessons, Maria Owens, Massachusetts, Meg Murry, Pedophile, Pirates, Salem, Season of the Witch, Witch City

Marissa Doyle was raised in a family of readers, which just might be a prerequisite for becoming a writer, I haven't looked into that. Growing up in Massachusetts, where she still lives, she has an affinity for the ocean and is happiest near or on the water, sailing Cape Cod. Being raised in Massachusetts means being steeped in this countries history, I mean, have you been to Boston? This might have a lot to do with her love of the past. In fact it was history, not writing, that she majored in in college, getting a degree in history and archaeology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Somehow she got distracted after graduation and the history she studied and the non-fiction she stills reads is now to inform her own writing of historical YA and fantasy for all ages. One piece of advice she's learned in her varied career is that "quite often, real life is far stranger and more wondrous than any fiction." It's these little oddities combined with real people and places that makes Marissa's writing stand out among typical Regency Genre fare.

While she's known for her writing, writing isn't all she does, being a wife and mother to children both human and fluffy bunny shaped. Marissa is also into collecting 19th century fashion prints. And if you love fashion, there's a pretty good chance you're into sewing of some kind. Marissa has "a strong drive to create, so when I'm not writing I'm quilting or knitting or needle-pointing or reupholstering furniture or sewing." I've always wanted to learn quilting, do you think Marissa might have time to teach me? Then again, I don't want to take her away from her writing... or her bunnies... As for the more clothing side of sewing, she's a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, which helps lend her books a veracity that sometimes is sadly lacking when the author doesn't even know what a Regency silhouette looks like. As for her "surprising fact" about the comfort of corsets (see below) I do agree they can be comfortable... thus again adding to the historical truth that her books hold. But enough from me, let's hear from Marissa.

Question: When did you first discover Jane Austen?

Answer: I read my first Austen in my mid-teens...and it wasn’t Pride and Prejudice. I loved (still do!) old books, and found a very small leatherbound volume of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion in a used bookstore. Persuasion is still tied with Pride and Prejudice as my favorite Austen. Oh, I did try P and P as a much younger girl, and couldn’t get past the beginning because I found Mrs. Bennett way too irritating. In my defense, I'll say that twelve-year-olds don’t always have the best-developed sense of irony.

Question: What do you think Jane Austen would think of her impact with so many literary offshoots, from parody to pastiche?

Answer: I expect she would be both bemused and amused, and would lampoon herself quite mercilessly to Cassandra and Fanny.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Answer: A better question might be where don’t I get inspiration from. Everything is grist for the mill: historical factoids, random snippets of conversation, artwork, dreams, music, casual brainstorming...you never know where the kernel of a plot or character might come from. It's why I always have a notebook and pen everywhere--my purse, my car, my bedside table. The bedside table pen lights up, in case I need to write something down in the middle of the night.

Question: What makes the early 19th century mesh so well with magic?

Answer: I’m not sure it’s just the early 19th century—I think almost anything before 1945 (and the first nuclear bomb) meshes well with magic. Maybe because science didn’t have all the answers yet (not that it does now, but it’s trying hard) so there seemed to be more room for magic in the world. And because in the 19th century, there were still so many physical remains of earlier centuries that hadn’t fallen to the wrecking ball of “progress” and development—remains that might have contained more than just historical presence.

Question: The world building and system of magic varies greatly in the regency fantasy genre, how did you go about creating yours?

Answer: The magic in my books very much runs in families, and in the female line (with a few notable exceptions.) I like being able to give girls power in an era during which girls and women didn’t have many rights and privileges. And because I love starting out with history and then layering magic in underneath it, I tend to prefer real-world historical settings where magic is secret and known only to a few, rather than alternate history where magic is an accepted part of the world.

Question: If you had to choose between writing only period literature or only fantasy literature, which would win?

Answer: Oh, that is a cruel, cruel choice! I think I’m going to have to say fantasy literature, just because while I’ve got ideas for two or three straight historical novels, I’ve got ideas for many fantasy stories, with settings from completely made up worlds to the here and now (and a few historical periods other than the 19th century...would those count?)

Question: Be honest, have you ever dressed up in Regency clothes just to pretend for a moment you are in the past?

Answer: You know what? I have been in entire ROOMS full of people dressed in Regency clothes doing that very thing. Not to mention Victorian clothes and medieval clothes. I met my husband in the Society for Creative Anachronism, for goodness’ sake. This totally doesn’t faze me. Surprising fact: Regency and even Victorian corsets can actually be very comfortable, because they offer excellent back support. All those old photographs you see of alarmingly straight-backed women? Don’t feel too sorry for them—underneath all those layers of clothing they were slouching against their corsets, which were doing the actual work of holding them up.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 19th Century, Bunnies, Cape Cod, Corset, Knitting, Magic, Marissa Doyle, Massachusetts, Notebook, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Quilting, Regency, Regency Magic, SCA, Science, Sense and Sensibility, Victorian, YA