James Reese is the author of The Witchery, The Book of Spirits, and The Book of Shadows. He lives in South Florida and Paris, France.
The Book of Shadows
by James Reese
eBook
$4.99
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ISBN-13:
9780061739569
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 10/13/2009
- Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 640
- Sales rank: 148,546
- File size: 1 MB
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Alone among the young girls taught by nuns at a convent school in nineteenth-century France, orphaned Herculine has neither wealth nor social connections. When she's accused of being a witch, the shy student is locked up with no hope of escape ... until her rescue by a real witch, the beautiful, mysterious Sebastiana. Swept away to the witch's manor, Herculine will enter a fantastic, erotic world to discover her true nature -- and her destiny -- in this breathtaking, darkly sensual first novel.
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Caleb Carr
A novelist of immense talent and promise,and a story that seeps into the mind like a potion.
Diana Gabaldon
Expertly researched,lavishly detailed and lushly written...an atmosphere so vivid you can smell it,and remarkably striking characters.
Kelley Armstrong
A spellbinding tale with a truly enchanting heroine.
Tampa Tribune
Darkly erotic...lavishly told...Prepare to put your life on hold for 468 pages and immerse yourself.
Publishers Weekly
A sinuous plot studded with uncanny surprises snakes through this nontraditional period gothic. Its first-person narrator, Herculine, seems cut from the same cloth as the heroines of classic sensationalist fiction: vulnerable, tragically orphaned and, at the tale's outset, immured in the tedious routines of early 19th-century French convent life. But Herculine's self-consciousness about unnamed physical endowments suggests an unusual heritage whose dimensions become known when a schoolgirl prank leads to shocking revelations of the "unnatural" and accusations of witchcraft. Before she can be tried, she is spirited to safety by witch Sebastiana d'Azur, a "Soror Mystica" who tutors her in the enchantments necessary for Herculine to fulfill her destiny: to liberate Father Louis and his lover, Madeleine de la Mettrie, two elemental spirits chained to earth. Herculine's instruction proves a pretext for relating elaborate 18th-century chronicles of Louis's trumped-up trial for witchcraft and Sebastiana's tutelage in the mysteries of the Craft, and it is through these tales that the novel comes into its own. Reese loosens restraints, making the novel more than a mere historical pastiche and jarring the reader with vivid accounts of Louis's cruel torture, the passion of Sebastiana's education and the revolting inhumanity of the French Revolution's reign of terror. Overlong and distractingly plotless, these interludes nevertheless impress, levering out in deceptively simple language the eroticism and violence smoldering beneath traditional gothic fustian. Though loosely episodic, the novel achieves a historical sweep that distinguishes Reese as a star pupil in the Anne Rice school of dark sensuality. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In this debut novel, Reese explores the dark world of obsession and magic in 18th-century Brittany. Orphaned Herculine has grown up in the narrow confines of a French convent. She knows that she is different and is both ashamed and afraid of these differences. Shocking events at the convent cause her to reevaluate her identity, as she is drawn into a web of sorcery and betrayal. Befriended by witches, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures, Herculine struggles to find a place for herself in the world. Should she help these new friends or run away as fast as she can? This novel shows potential that is, alas, unrealized. A confusing setting and plot are complicated by Reese's insistence on developing minor characters at the expense of his protagonist. Lengthy tangential chapters serve only to muddy the waters further. Not recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/01.] Laurel Bliss, Yale Arts Lib. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Debut supernatural vampire/witch superdrama whose lesson seems to be that sex is better when (1) it's a sin, (2) it hurts, and (3) it involves barely adolescent girls. Our nameless narrator of variable gender starts as the prize pupil in a generic European girls' prep school, but it's not long before she's dabbling in sexual experimentation with a classmate. Merde! She discovers that she likes being struck, that she ejaculates "nightsalt" in wet dreams, etc. The school administrators accuse her of being a demon and lock her up, conveniently, in Satan's library. She thinks to kill herself when she learns that she will be tried at the hands ofdouble-merde!men, but then she realizes that she really is a witch and maybe it's not so bad. After all, she gets to have sex with a demon priest who had once been burned at the stake (no biggie), and is soon introduced to four demon saviors, who tutor her but also need her help to escape their mortal coils. She also learns that she might not be strictly female after all, but nevertheless engages in a sexual relationship with a servant named Romeo while she reads the shadow books of her saviors (the Cliff's Notes of witchdom) and prepares to write her own. She eventually helps her demon pals escape, becomes a man, and sails off to America. Mon Dieu! More often than not, the author seems to be performing self-therapy on his own fixation with lesbian witches. But demons arguing Aristotle and Plato do not save prose whose intent is only to titillate. Fear may be exciting, and pain may be secretly enjoyable, but when young girls refer to their vaginas as "nether mouths" it seems nothing more than garden-variety porn. Harry Potter for oversexed Wiccafreaks. Masochists, hermaphrodites and nun-fetishists unite!
Washington Post Book World
Vivid characters...painstaking research...delectable.New Orleans Times-Picayune
[A] very enjoyable debut...lush prose...sensual description, vivid sex scenes.Booklist
Dark, mysterious, sumptuous, lusty, and other worldly...rich in style and allusion, both literary and historical.Orlando Sentinel
Meticulously crafted and thoroughly enchanting. . . .A work of imaginative wizardry.The Jackson Clarion-Ledger
A sweeping narrative of period and peril [that] transports the reader into an undiscovered realm of erotica...Anne Rice
It’s marvelous to have one so eloquent exploring and transcending the gothic genre.