Sunday, January 23, 2011

Persy -- A Chalice of Wind by Cate Tiernan

Thais Allard's father dies in a car accident, and suddenly her new guardian is a woman she's never met before, and Thais has to move to Louisiana. There, she meets Clio -- her long lost twin. As if that's not enough, Clio and her grandmother, Petra, are witches, and so is Thais.

But it gets more complicated. Turns out Petra is part of the Treize, a group of Witches with a dark past. Hundreds of years ago, the Treize performed powerful magic and became immortal. Petra is not Clio's and Thais's grandmother at all (more like great great great great great great, etc....).

As more and more questions get asked, there's also the whole drama with Luc/André. Ah, young love.
A Chalice of Wind is the first of four in Cate Tiernan's Balefire series. I read the first three books a long time ago, and then they kind of slipped from my mind until recently and I started rereading them so I could finish the series. Cate Tiernan is more well known for her Sweep series, a collection of fifty million (or, okay, thirteen) books about Wicca which look, honestly, boring as heck.

It's kind of hard to figure out what's wrong with Balefire, or rather, what's right. Neither Clio nor Thais are likeable at all, and there's just something weird with the writing in general. The plot and story is really interesting, especially the pasts and thoughts of all the other characters. Richard is my personal favorite. The thing is, you just don't care about Clio and Thais. They come close to death a few times or heartbreak or joy or whatever, and you just do not care. Or I didn't, anyway. Despite this, it's really easy to get pulled in and keep reading. But at the end, you wonder why you went through the whole thing and why you want to read the next one.

I mostly just want to finish it out of curiousity. I want to know how it ends, and I want to know more about what happened all those years ago with the Treize and everything. I do not, however, really want to listen to more of Clio's and Thais's thoughts, which is unfortunate since most of it is told from their perspective.

I'd recommend this series to light readers who are fans of urban fantasy, even though you really can't classify this as urban fantasy. More just young adult fantasy, I guess. It's not all that memorable or noteworthy, so I wouldn't go out of your way to read it.

--Persy

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