Okay, I was at a flea market and I saw these two books, Witch Child and Sorceress by Celia Rees.  They looked supernatural and were like a buck a piece so I figured, what’s the worst that could happen?  Well, I got halfway through the Witch Child and I looked it up on Amazon just to see what else this author had written, etc because I was really enjoying it.  Well, much to my chagrin, it turns out that these books are written for pre-teen girls.  That’s right.  Pre-teen girls.  Imagine my shame when I saw that these were featured on lists like “Books For Teenage Girls That Will Rock You Soxs.”  Okay, I can take being lumped in with teenage girls, but can we please watch the spelling?  And, I’m just going to come out and say it.  I was into the story enough to finish it anyway.  And also read the second book.  So there.  The first one, Witch Child, was quite simply a very beautifully written first person narrative.  It follows Mary, a fourteen year old witch-girl from the site of her grandmother’s hanging for witchcraft across the ocean to the New World where she settles with Puritans.  Of course, lots of light-hearted fun ensues.  The narrative ends very abruptly, (fitting, as it’s being told in the first person) and it is suitably jolting. 

Alas, Sorceress is less of a success.  Rees jumps back and forth between Mary’s story and the story of one of her present-day descendents, Agnes, also known as Searching Sky.  (Yes, apparently Mary got in with the savages after being shunt by the paleface dicks.)    The shifting in the narrative from one point of view to another, to in some chapters, even another is not something Rees really accomplishes with any kind of fluidity.  It would have been much better to just stick with Mary’s story, but then you she would have had to lose a clever gimmick.  Sadly, sometimes an idea, shrewd as it might be, just does not serve the story.  It happens to the best writers.  It’s hard to let go of a brilliant idea.  But this concept isn’t quite sharp enough to distract us from noticing just how disjointed this narrative feels.

So there.  Witch Child was very good.  Sorceress kept my attention when it was following Mary.  So if you’ll excuse me, now I have to go put on my training bra or listen to Panic at the Disco or Creed or arrange my Hello Kitty things or whatever the shit twelve year old girls are doing these days.