12.10.2014 | Wednesday

Blood Magick

category: Book Reviews
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Blood Magicktitle: Blood Magick
author: Nora Roberts
series: The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy #3
published: 28 October 2014
publisher: Berkley
genre(s): contemporary, fantasy, historical, romance
pages: 337
source: bought
format: eBook
buy/shelve it: Amazon | B&N | BookBub | Goodreads

rating: three-half-stars | series rating: five-stars

the blurb

County Mayo is rich in the traditions of Ireland, legends that Branna O’Dwyer fully embraces in her life and in her work as the proprietor of The Dark Witch shop, which carries soaps, lotions, and candles for tourists, made with Branna’s special touch.

Branna’s strength and selflessness hold together a close circle of friends and family—along with their horses and hawks and her beloved hound. But there’s a single missing link in the chain of her life: love…

She had it once—for a moment—with Finbar Burke, but a shared future is forbidden by history and blood. Which is why Fin has spent his life traveling the world to fill the abyss left in him by Branna, focusing on work rather than passion.

Branna and Fin’s relationship offers them both comfort and torment. And though they succumb to the heat between them, there can be no promises for tomorrow. A storm of shadows threatens everything that their circle holds dear. It will be Fin’s power, loyalty, and heart that will make all the difference in an age-old battle between the bonds that hold their friends together and the evil that has haunted their families for centuries.


my review

I love Nora Roberts and I have loved this series.  The characters are rich and interesting.  The story line was engrossing, the epic battle between good and evil that has been going on for centuries.  But this last book disappointedd me a bit, which is not something I expected.

The story of the battle, of magic, and of the intrigue was just as engrossing in this nove as the previous two.  It was the romance, I think, that suffered in this book, as well as the individual stories of Branna and Fin.  In each of the first two books, we really got to know the two central characters, both as a couple and individually.  We watched them grow and change.  There wasn’t a lot of that in this book.  Branna spent most of it pushing Fin away if it started to get too emotionally charged.  He was completely seondary to her story right up until the end.

The ending, too, felt a bit anticlimatic.  There was such build-up and then it was over almost before it began.  It is not like Nora Roberts to end a series like that, rushed and a bit flat.

It wasn’t a bad book.  It just wasn’t as rich as most of Nora Robert’s novels.

About Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, the youngest of five children. After a school career that included some time in Catholic school and the discipline of nuns, she married young and settled in Keedysville, Maryland.
She worked briefly as a legal secretary. “I could type fast but couldn’t spell, I was the worst legal secretary ever,” she says now. After her sons were born she stayed home and tried every craft that came along. A blizzard in February 1979 forced her hand to try another creative outlet. She was snowed in with a three and six year old with no kindergarten respite in sight and a dwindling supply of chocolate.
Born into a family of readers, Nora had never known a time that she wasn’t reading or making up stories. During the now-famous blizzard, she pulled out a pencil and notebook and began to write down one of those stories. It was there that a career was born. Several manuscripts and rejections later, her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981.
Nora met her second husband, Bruce Wilder, when she hired him to build bookshelves. They were married in July 1985. Since that time, they’ve expanded their home, traveled the world and opened a bookstore together.
Through the years, Nora has always been surrounded by men. Not only was she the youngest in her family, but she was also the only girl. She has raised two sons. Having spent her life surrounded by men, Ms. Roberts has a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she’s been quoted as saying, a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming.
Nora is a member of several writers groups and has won countless awards from her colleagues and the publishing industry. Recently The New Yorker called her “America’s favorite novelist.”

Rating Report
plot
three-stars
characters
three-stars
writing
four-stars
pacing
three-stars
Overall: three-stars

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