Thursday, March 22, 2012

Book review: White Witch by Trish Milburn



Title: White Witch (Book 1 of the Coven Series)
Author: Trish Milburn
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books
Release Date: 03/01/2012
ISBN: 9781611940831






Witchcraft Is Her Family's Business.
No One Quits The Family And Lives To Tell About It.

"Jax" Pherson has power, enough power to know her future will end in service to the dark coven her father controls. Unless she can stay hidden in a small community in the mountains of North Carolina. She must find a way to live without magic and deny the darkness she feels welling up inside her-the same dark power that fuels the covens around the world.

All she wants is a normal life. A boyfriend. Friends. Some place to belong, but all too soon Jax's barely begun new life hangs in the balance when she discovers that the boy she's attracted to is sworn to kill her kind. He's a hunter with good reason to kill everything that goes bump in the night.

Even the most fleeting use of her power is tantamount to signing her death warrant and will bring both hunter and coven down on her. But can she walk away when her friends are threatened by an old evil? Something created by the magic of witches? Jax's only hope of survival is to convince the boy she loves to forget everything he's ever been taught and help her find a way to fight the covens. To believe there is some good in her.


I have to say that while this book wasn't perfect, it was insanely fun to read. A lot of the trends for witch books have been to cast witches as poor misunderstood groups with factions who "just" misuse their powers. This book has witches who appear to have deliberately tainted their magic with darkness and are very much the epitome of evil witch. Minus the ugly part, though. Apparently one of the bennies of being twisted around is that you all look drop dead gorgeous.

One of the things that this book has going for it is that while there's a lot (and I mean a LOT) of familiar literary tropes in here, Milburn has such an addicting writing style that you really don't care that you've seen similar versions of this story before. The characters here are easy to like, but I'll admit that it's the secondary characters of Stacy and Toni that I really got hooked on to. I loved Toni because she had the most description (plus she's a Whedon fan) and Stacy was fun because well, it's always fun to have a snotty mean girl around.

I did like the sparks and chemistry between our main character Jax and her love interest Kellan, although part of me does feel that it's more lust driven at times than romantically driven. Don't get me wrong, they do make an excellent couple but I just couldn't see the "OMG love" development until later in the book. Since there's at least two more books for this, I figure that there's enough time to have the relationship develop past the extremes and have more scenes that are more tender and less action or lust driven scenes. This I sort of think was a result of the book moving so insanely fast. Milburn has the book progressing at a pretty fast pace, with me wishing that some things (such as the romance and more background info on Jax and the covens) were given more screen time to develop.

Overall this was a blast to read and if you're a fan of books like Tiernan's Sweep, you'll probably like White Witch. It's well worth purchasing, in my opinion. There's enough here to make me seriously long for the next two books in the series.

4 out of 5 stars

(Arc provided by Netgalley)

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