ChelsReads: The Cousins O'Dwyer Series by Nora Roberts

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!

Let's Geek Out: Percy Jackson and the Heroes of Olympus

As a lifetime lover of books and all things magical, I decided that I'd like to start talking about my favorite series of books and also television every now and again and I thought that I would start with Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series for my first Let's Geek Out post. 

For those who aren't familiar with Percy Jackson, or maybe saw the awful movies they made that don't measure up at all to the books, I'll give a little bit of background. To me, it is almost similar to Harry Potter in that it is about a seemingly ordinary young man with extraordinary origins who is faced with challenges that we mere mortals could not even dream of. Except that Rick Riordan did. Percy Jackson and his friends are demigods, or the offspring of both god and mortal parents. In the books, they face a series of challenges that echo classic Greek myth and deal with them in new and interesting ways. I don't want to give too much away in case anyone out there does want to read them but that's the gist of it. 

Considering that I, yet again, preordered Rick Riordan's next book on Amazon the other day, I felt it only fair that I should probably write a bit about his book series since I think it is also safe to say that it is one of my favorites. 

I initially picked up the Percy Jackson series of books in 2010 when my family was headed to Florida to go to DisneyWorld. I'm a travel reader and wanted to make sure that I would have enough material to encompass all the downtime we had on the planes and outside of the parks which meant boxed set. I started and finished all of the first three books in the series and immediately checked out the rest from the library when I got home. 

Being a longtime mythology nerd (especially Greek mythology), reading and listening to the stories was doubly fun because I knew which myths they were mentioning and recognized the parallels between the story arch I was reading and the one that originated thousands of years ago. While it's a series for young adults, it is definitely a great series of books and an interesting way to brush up or learn about mythology as you go. 

The feelings of sadness I experienced after I finished the books was intense. Only to find out that he had released a whole new series of books that now incorporated Roman myth as well as the Greek called the Heroes of Olympus. I learned about this while I was still working at the college bookstore and luckily was able to read the first two books for free during my work hours at the desk (this is also how I read the Hunger Games series and Divergent). Since quitting that job over two years ago, I've had to start paying for my literature and I don't mind at all. 

It bothers me immensely that these are out of order. Son of Neptune is the second book, then The Mark of Athena. 

I've preordered and devoured the last three, now four, books that have been released in the series on my Kindle and I can't wait till October 7th to read the next one! 

I have a feeling that The Blood of Olympus will be the last book in the series and that bums me out a bit but I think that it should be a really exciting read nonetheless.