Saturday, April 16 is soon approaching—and I’m reading as fast as I can in anticipation of the five YA author visit at the Ontario Senior Center from 1-4 PM. I previously reviewed Evermore by Alyson Noel. I just finished Wicked: Witch. Nancy Holder, one of the novel’s two authors will also be at the Teen Book Fest.

In this first book of the series, Holly Cathers, our powerful teen witch, has no idea who she is or what her destiny involves. The book opens with a terrible river rafting accident in which Holly’s parents are killed. When she goes to live with her cousins, her true destiny becomes known. The Cathers are members of an ancient coven of powerful witches who have a longstanding rivalry with the cove of the Deveroux clan. The spirit of one Isabel is reincarnated in Holly; in the clan Deveroux, Jer is the one with a reincarnated family member living in his person—Jon, who was Isabel’s husband and rival 600 years earlier.

Now the covens fight over the secret to the Black Fire, and members will gladly kill one another—and I don’t mean just members of the opposing coven, I mean father killing son, a man knocking off the woman he’s having an affair with, anyone is game.

If you enjoy a book full of witchcraft and the supernatural—potions, powders, Ouija boards, cats as familiars, appearances of the dead (and decaying), folks dropping dead from spells, unexplained incidents around every corner—you’ll enjoy Witches. Two caveats: As though the authors are trying to fit in every possible witchcraft myth (and even Shamanism), you’ll have to accept that people get sudden powers and then suddenly become even more powerful at just the right time. (They also have a great ability to figure out what happened in the past, down to the very last detail, just by dreaming about it.) And the book is for mature readers. In some of the flashbacks to the covens 600 years earlier, there are some gross sacrifices and insinuations of drinking human blood, etc.