Wicked:Witch and Curse is something of a double whammy of a book. For starters, it comprises the first two novels, Witch and Curse, of the Wicked series. And then there is the small matter of the novels having two authors.
Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié met at a Maui Writers’ Retreat some years ago. Holder will be familiar to many of you as the writer of no small number of Buffy, Angel and Smallville books. Viguié was her student at the retreat. They clearly hit it off and the five novels (to date) of the Wicked series are the result.
Witch was first published in 2002, and Curse the following year. The next two novels in the series, Legacy and Spellbound, also came out in 2003 but readers have had to wait until this July for the fifth novel, Resurrection. In the meantime, no doubt in an effort to drum up a little interest, the first four have been re-packaged into two two-novel volumes which were issued in late 2008. Still, I shouldn’t be too churlish about that: two novels for £6.99 is a pretty good deal by anyone’s standards and when the novels are this readable...
But I’m getting ahead of myself. So back to business.
Witch opens with turmoil. Holly Cather’s parents have taken Holly and her best friend on a white water rafting trip on the Colorado river. They have also taken their argument; one of those weeks-long arguments that can only end in catastrophe. So it doesn’t really come as a huge surprise when the weather starts to imitate Holly’s parents, turning the river into a swirling hell from which Holly alone emerges alive.
Orphaned, and best-friendless Holly finds herself dragged from her beloved San Francisco to chilly, and infinitely wetter Seattle, to join two cousins, Nicole and Amanda, and their mother, and Holly’s father’s sister, Marie-Claire. These are relations she never knew she had and as the novel progresses we realise why her father had cut all ties with his family: the Cathers are witches, descended from the ancient family of Cahors in France and the sworn enemies of the equally ancient and French Deveraux witches. And therein lies the problem, because the leading member of the 21st Century Deveraux family, Michael, is alive and well and living around the corner in Seattle.
In Witch, Holly starts to discover her heritage. She begins to settle into her new family, slowly becoming aware of her own and their abilities. At the same time she also starts to understand the powerful link that exists between herself and her 13th century French ancestor Isabeau de Cahors, an understanding which is enhanced when she meets Michael Deveraux’s son, Jer, who is himself drawn back to the 13th Century through his links with Isabeau’s lover, Jean de Deveraux.
What follows is partly the traditional battle between good (female) and evil (male) and partly a Romeo and Juliette style love story. (The reference is deliberate, by the way. Nicole is actually starring as Juliette in the school play during the ferocious final battle of the novel!) On the way there’s also a fair bit of self discovery (not just on the part of Holly and Jer) and challenge to the stereotypes, most notably the ‘male=bad’ one, you’ll be glad to hear.
Curse picks up from Witch a year later. By then Jer is a physical mess hidden away on a mythical island and kept awake by goodness knows what magic, Nicole has run away to Europe to escape her destiny (yes, you knew that would be a mistake) and Holly has become Coven Mother back in Seattle. Needless to say the battle between the Cahors and the Deveraux reaches a further stage, this time accompanied by pyrotechnics that leave the reader gasping for breath. The two harbour scenes are stunners and would look great in CGI.
I won’t say more about the plot, for to do so would take me into spoiler territory. These are both fast paced, page turners of books and I was left at the end of Curse wanting more. This is not just because so many questions are left unanswered, nor because of all the hooks into the next novels. I had also grown fond of the characters and I want to know whether they survive and in what mangled emotional and physical state.
And so, you may ask, was there anything I didn’t like? Well, yes, actually, there was. You see Holder and Viguié consistently use a particular collective noun for a group of covens. It’s Coventry! I can’t imagine that bothers the original American readers a jot, but every time I hit it, an image of a dull Midlands city would swim before my eyes. And apart from wet weather I really could not see what Coventry had to do with anything.
But that’s a pretty niggling criticism. I found both Witch and Curse hard to put down. You may have the same problem.
Wicked by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié, published by Simon and Schuster, September 2008
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