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I have to give Lisa Kleypas credit — usually when an established mainstream genre romance author takes a stab at something paranormal, the result is painful. That was not the case here. Justine is a hereditary witch, born with magic and raised in pagan traditions drawn from real-world religions such as Wicca. The world building was smooth, consistent, and believable.<\/p>\n
Justine was cursed at birth so that she would never love a man. The reason — when a witch loves a man, he is doomed to die. Hey, the universe demands a price for magic. It doesn’t come free. Justine isn’t aware of that fact when she learns of the curse’s existence and promptly breaks it.<\/p>\n
The next thing she knows, she’s tumbling head over heals in love with Jason — a man without a soul. Now don’t get me wrong — he’s a perfectly good man. There just isn’t anything in him that will live past the death of his body. When he dies, that will be it.<\/p>\n
He knows he doesn’t have a soul. He wants to steal Justine’s grymoire to see what he can do about that problem.<\/p>\n
The romantic tension was good. Chemistry was good. The romance was a bit whirlwind and didn’t have as much of a firm footing as I like, but under the circumstances it was probably better that way.<\/p>\n
The ending was surprisingly satisfying. (That’s all I can say without spoilers. \ud83d\ude42 )<\/p>\n
I would recommend this novel to both romance readers AND to fantasy readers who think they’d like to try some romance. It’s a good cross-over book, and that’s hard to find!<\/p>\n
Rating 4\/5<\/p>\n
Title: Crystal Cove
\nAuthor: Lisa Kleypas
\nISBN: 0749953934
\nPublished February 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have to give Lisa Kleypas credit — usually when an established mainstream genre romance author takes a stab at something paranormal, the result is painful. That was not the case here. Justine is a hereditary witch, born with magic and raised in pagan traditions drawn from real-world religions such as Wicca. The world building […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,57,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-im-reading","category-fantasy-what-im-reading","category-romance-what-im-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2408"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2410,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions\/2410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}