Saturday, April 3, 2010

Wicked series by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie

Most of the time I find books to read based off of ideas from friends or online searches for good fantasy series to read. However, my choosing of the Wicked series by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie came about in a different manner. During an interviewing class my junior year I was told I needed to conduct an interview with someone who held my dream job. Seeing as how my dream is to write a bestselling fantasy series I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to manage that feat. I called and emailed every author I had enjoyed encountering until Nancy Holder, the author of one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer books I owned, finally agreed to a phone interview. Seeing as how I hadn’t read much from Holder I began researching her and came across Witch from the Wicked series. I was intrigued but the series was incomplete and I already had a list of plenty of other fantasy novels I wanted to read so I chose not to read it.

So when I looked for books to bring on vacation to Florida with me and I came across two books, each one featuring two of the five books in the Wicked series, I decided to go for it. I devoured the first three before the week-long vacation was over. The story was very compelling. The plot of a group of young women learning witchcraft wasn’t as stereotypical as I was afraid it would be. In the book the Cathers family of witches has an ongoing feud with the warlock Devereux family but it’s much more than that. The characters are often possessed by ancestors who attempt to use them for their own purposes. The main couple, Holly and Jer, must fight with each other’s families as well as their own, toying with the concept of darkness and light. What could have been a typical story is changed by the psychological developments the characters go through.

I will admit that I loved the series to the point where I was forced to search multiple stores to find the fifth and final book in the series. I finished it in approximately 5 hours, not even able to put it down when a party was going on downstairs from where I was curled up reading. It was an engrossing story with characters and magic that came alive and practically jumped off the page. Holder and Viguie are wonderful authors who use the Wicked series to show that they have the knowledge to grasp magic, psychology, and character development in order to write a stunning series.

If you enjoy fantasy series at all I certainly suggest you take a look at the Wicked series by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie.