As mentioned in my November Favorites post, I recently started (and devoured) the Cousins O'Dwyer series by Nora Roberts over my Thanksgiving holiday and couldn't put the books down even after I came back home. These were my first Nora Roberts books, at least that I've read. As I mentioned in my favorites post, there was a Lifetime Movie Series based on her books running around the time I graduated in 2009. As a girl with her own (very) Irish roots, I have a tendency to gravitate toward anything based in the "mother land" but even more so because of the magical component of this series. When I read the description of the first book on Amazon, I immediately clicked the Buy button, but sort of forgot about it until headed down to Fort Bragg.
The series opens in the 13th century with a powerful witch, Sorcha, and her three children: Brannaugh (Bran-ugh), Eamon (Ay-mon), and Teagan. Threatened by a dark sorcerer named Cabhan (Ca-van), who covets not only her great power but her incredible beauty, Sorcha must stop him to keep him away from her children. To keep them safe, Sorcha sends them to live with her cousins, The O'Dwyers, hidden from Cabhan.
In preparing for what she knows will be her final showdown, she gives her power to her children, creating within them the power of "The Three." While each of them is magically powerful on their own, they are nigh unstoppable when working together. When he comes for her, Sorcha attempts to destroy him, using the last bit of power that she has to poison him but for some unforeseeable reason, he isn't completely destroyed. With her last breath, she curses Cabhan, and all that come from him, to be ended by her bloodline, whether her children or another Three thousands of years later.
Flash forward to spring of 2013 and the first book of the series, Dark Witch, when petite, blonde Iona Shehan moves from America to Ireland in hopes of finding her destiny and her roots with her cousins, Branna and Connor O'Dwyer. I won't lie to you, the first chapter or so of the book based in Iona's perception are a little hard to get through. I'm not sure if it's because she's so scattered, having been uprooted from her previous life, or if I wasn't used to Roberts' writing style yet, but I wasn't too sure about the book at the beginning. However, once it progressed, I was all in and definitely couldn't put it down.
Without giving too much away, because I really can't recommend the read more, and want you to find out for yourselves. The current "Three", Iona and her cousins are, as the generations that have come before them, charged with destroying Cabhan once and for all and the three books detail their exploits in trying to do so after Iona makes her way to Ireland and completes the circle. Along the way, because they're Nora Roberts books, everyone falls in love in one way or another and there's a great sense of family, both blood-related and chosen, interwoven throughout the series which I greatly enjoyed.
If I'm completely honest with you, the second book, Shadow Spell, was my favorite (which is weird for me in trilogies because the second book is almost always filler-y fluff) because I found that I related so much more to Connor O'Dwyer than I did to either one of the women (Roberts centered each of the books around one of the three cousins and how they felt about the whole deal as the drama unfolded). Connor just has such an easy way about him; he's quick and funny and cares about everyone close to him. While I really enjoyed the first book (or I wouldn't have downloaded the entire series before I even left Fort Bragg), it was definitely the second book that made me fall in love with the cousins and the series as a whole.
While I read the books on my Kindle (they retail on Amazon for $2.50/book in the Kindle format), you can find these books all over and I wholeheartedly recommend reading them if magic is up your alley.
Cheers!
Stay tuned for a recipe from the books over on Eat.Drink.Adventure later this week!
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