Mother Ocean, Daughter Sea

Mother Ocean, Daughter Sea
Diana Marcellas, 2001

Recent eBook release - I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley for the purpose of review.

Premise: Brierley is a healer by birth, in a land where the people who had magic in the blood were thought to have been all killed long ago. Her calling brings her into politics and danger, and she’s not sure where her destiny will lie, or what she wants it to be.

There are things I really liked about this book. I like the way Brierley’s magic works. I love her connections with previous generations of witches, knowing them mostly through secret diaries. I really like her philosophical musings about the place of those with magic, the choices they make to hide themselves. I like the hints about what could have gone so wrong between two peoples long ago. I love love LOVE her relationship with a late-introduced character, Megan.

But then there’s a romance and everything is terrible.

Some spoilers follow.

Sure, it was relatively well-handled, it could have been much worse, but it just seemed so out-of-tone, and there were so much more interesting ways to take the relationship. I spent a good portion of the book praying these two characters were never going to sleep together. They very nearly don’t! And then, spoiler, they do. Grrr.

Now, if I keep reading this series, there’s a chance that this will be brushed off as a fling by both of them, (one character is very young, and the other is married) and we can all move on.

It just disappointed me that this annoying thing was stuck in the middle of what was otherwise a book I was really connecting to, a book about one woman, thinking about her place in the world, how she can forgive her mother, seek her kin, learn from the women who went before.

And it frankly broke quite a bit of the respect I had for both characters. Primarily because Brierley, because she’s a telepath/empath, knows things about the guy and his wife that make me really want them (guy and wife, not guy and Brierley) to be happy together. Now, this might be the point, to break them both down a little, make them human and give them flaws to struggle with.

But from skimming the promo copy for the next book, it doesn’t seem like it.

Ugh, there was so much I liked about it, but that just kinda broke the thread of my emotional involvement with the story. There was still enough I liked to give it a medium score though.

3 Stars - A Good Book

Important Note: Open Road Media, who printed this e-edition, is still not so great on their quality control. At least in the galley version, OCR typos abound: mat for that being one of the most repeated.