Witchling (Sisters of the Moon, Book 1)

Witchling (Sisters of the Moon, Book 1)
by Yasmine Galenorn

Witchling (Sisters of the Moon, Book 1)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Yasmine Galenorn
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-03
ISBN: 0425212548
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Berkley

Book Reviews of Witchling (Sisters of the Moon, Book 1)

Book Review: Do not read this book. If you do read this book, don't do it sober.
Summary: 1 Stars

There aren't many books that I start and don't finish. This may well be the first such that I've taken the time to review. A friend of mine got a copy of Yasmine Galenorn's Witchling as a white elephant gift at a Yule celebration, from a young man who told us that he started reading her Wicca 101; she warned me that it was bad, but my other reading project - Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead - had proven too meaty for bedtime reading, and I was looking to chillax. It's not like I don't have a place in my heart for trashy urban fantasy.

The writing is just plain bad. All semester I was chastised by my lit professor for my refusal to "embrace the marginalia", to mark in the books. Reading Witchling I very nearly grabbed a red pen for striking extraneous transitions and adverbs. There's not so much exposition as there is ill-timed info-dumping. The book is so full of pop culture references, that even as someone from the time and place where the book was written, I find many of the references to be incomprehensible. It's like the book never saw an editor ... maybe not even a private test audience.

The story revolves around three sisters, half human and half Faerie, whose mixed-blood heritage causes their Faerie magic and power to fail at random. The eldest sister is a witch, disdainful of human Wiccans and Pagans and of full-blooded humans (called "FBHs"by the otherworldly characters) in general. The middle sister is a were-cat whose her animal form is a striped tabby. The third was a "natural acrobat" with Spiderman-like wall climbing powers ... until they failed and dropped her into a nest of vampires, who turned her. Although not particularly original, the characters had the potential to be interesting. That potential was wasted.

The characters work for the OIA - the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. That's right, Faerieland has an intelligence agency. A bureaucratic one, that puts its agents up in hovels and uses tacky gift shops as fronts, that hires loser humans who are essentially fanboys of the magical community, whose chief purpose seems to be a foil for longwinded exposition. Rather than living in an OIA hovel, the sisters live in an old Victorian mansion - a thirty minute commute outside of Seattle, which is apparently a very long drive in the mind of Yasmine Galenorn. The sisters have this mansion, and legal identities in the United States, because their mother insisted that they get Social Security numbers ... except that their mother left earth during World War II, and children weren't commonly given Social Security numbers until the 1980s when the tax law was changed so that you couldn't claim an unnumbered child as a deduction.

The story opens with a new assignment: the characters must investigate the death of Jocko the iant. Yes: Jocko the giant. Who, at over seven feet, is a dwarf giant. Who has a giant penis and likes to have sex with human women. He was killed by a demon - the characters can tell, because they can smell it on the rope that killed him. There's a new demon lord in hell - "Shadow Wing", seriously? - about whom the characters (who spend a lot of time telling us, the reader, that they're peons) mysteriously know more than the OIA. A seer tells the main character that Shadow Wing is a soul eater ... as if that were something rare and unique, rather than a staple of both the genre in particular and mythology as a whole.

Although there's big trouble afoot, the oldest sister takes a night off to take her youngest sister to a Vampires Anonymous meeting. Yes. VA.

After the VA meeting, the oldest sister goes to meet the seer who will tell her about the coming troubles ... but not before taking a few moments to fantasize about an ex and decide that, no, she doesn't have time to masturbate. Yes, I've had days like that. But they don't make good fiction. So instead she gets dressed in special Faerie clothes that won't get caught on the underbrush.

The seer is an "Elemental", one of the "Hags of Fate", an immortal who lives near a portal outside of town and outside the control of the OIA (explain to me how a few miles outside of town is beyond the reach of the Otherworld authorities?). She reads the character's heart, issues a prophesy, and demands a price: the finger bone of a demon or her own finger if she can't find one. The seer would be a solid character ... except that Galenorn named her "Grandmother Coyote".

The MC's ex is a "Svartan", from Svartalfheim, and although I made it a little bit past this reveal, this is where the book really lost me. If he he were actually a Svartalf it wouldn't be so bad: smithfolk from the darkest depths of the Norse world, and about whom very few specifics remain. They're black-skinned, mysterious, borderline evil, and the narrator actually says "once you go Svartan, you never go back." Essentially, they're a magically endowed disaster of racial stereotypes about black people.

I wanted to make it to the end and catalogue all the fail, but I just couldn't hack it. I gave up at the top of page 58. Do not even attempt to read this book without a bong in one hand and a glass of cheep wine in the other.

Summary of Witchling (Sisters of the Moon, Book 1)

We?re the D?Artigo sisters: Half-human, half-Faerie, we?re savvy?and sexy?operatives for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency.  But our mixed-blood heritage short-circuits our talents at all the wrong times.  My sister Delilah shapeshifts into a tabby cat whenever she?s stressed.  Menolly?s a vampire who?s still trying to get the hang of being undead.  And me?  I?m Camille?a wicked-good witch.  Except my magic?s as unpredictable as the weather, as my enemies are about to find out the hard way...

At the Wayfarer Inn, a portal to Otherworld and the local hangout for humans and beasties alike, a fellow operative, Jocko, has been murdered.  Every clue points to Shadow Wing, the soul-munching, badass leader of the Subterranean Realms.  He?s made it clear that he aims to raze humankind to the ground, turning both Earth and Otherworld into his private playground.  Our assignment:  Keep Shadow Wing and his minions from creeping into Earth via the Wayfarer.  The demons figure they?re in like Flynn.  After all, with only my bumbling sisters and me standing in the way, how can they miss?  But we?ve got a secret for them:  Faulty wiring or not, nobody kicks ass like the D?Artigo girls...

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