Scribblegirl's Reviews > Book of Shadows

This book is a good book for many reasons. 1. Unlike Harry Potter, it uses real terms and they do what real wiccans would do. This I can relate to unlike Harry Potter. 2. Cate Tiernan did research on the way of the wiccans and only added few extra stuff to get the story to have a plot. And 3rd. I can feel the characters and I hated Cal because of how she makes him act. And I like Hunter because even tho she makes him should bad I still liked him.

People like books for different reasons, you like detail and I like to know how they feel. The way you typed it is basically like you thought the book was going to be another Harry Potter book but it turns out to be about the real thing. Just because she wrote a book that way doesn't mean she is lazy, it just means she wanted a different book.

As a writer, I found her unforgivably lazy.

I too thought her lazy. It was like she did research on Wicca and thought, "This would be an interesting book." then she proceeded to regurgitate all of the research back to us without benefit of a solid plot or character development. Lame.

I am a Wiccan and loved these books. There pretty close to the way most wiccans fill. I like how she told the story. I don't think it was anything like Harry potter. Harry Potter is more fantasy. This book is more real life Wicca. And if you say that I don't know what I'm talking about. Well I do. I come from a family of Wiccans. Everyone has there thoughts. Mone are that these are quick reads that kept me hocked. And that's all that matters.

I'm not going to say you don't know what you're talking about with regards to Wicca. My problem with this book has nothing to do with Wicca and everything to do with crappy writing and storytelling. It's not enough to "do research" and make your story "factual." You also have to make it believable, and you do that by giving your characters actual motivation for the choices they make and by making them behave in a manner which is believable to the reader. Any book which uses the words/phrases "somehow", "for some reason", "without knowing why" and the like as many times as this one does is a lazily-written book. Tiernan couldn't be arsed to come up with a reason other than magick for all the stuff that happened, and that's not only lazy, it's bad writing. If a character doesn't know why she's doing something, especially something against her nature, maybe she should look into that a little deeper. If you suddenly wanted to cross the street into traffic to get to some guy you didn't even like, narrowly missing getting hit by traffic the entire way, you might want to look into why you did such a stupid, dangerous thing. If you're not interested in why you did that, then don't expect me to be. When a writer can't be bothered to supply actual motivation for her characters, then I have to believe I'm dealing with stupid characters. And since I don't tolerate stupidity well in real life, there's no way I want to waste my time with it in the fantasy life of my reading, either. Book of Shadows is a lazy story with lazy characters from a lazy writer. It's possible that Tiernan is actually a good writer; I don't know because I've never read any of her other books. But this book is trite, clichéed and lazy.