Enemy of Entropy

Review: The Watcher Series by Lilith Saintcrow

25 August 2008, 5:40 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Reading.

Mindhealer (Watcher, Book 5) Mind­healer by Lilith Saint­crow


My review


rat­ing: 3 of 5 stars
I’m actu­ally review­ing all five of the Watcher books. They’re quite short—novella length, really—and very much inter­re­lated (espe­cially the first four). I read all of them in about a day and a half, despite doing other things. I do advise tak­ing them all in row, which is the equiv­a­lent of read­ing one “nor­mal” novel.

Dark Watcher opens in San­ti­ago City (aka Saint City), with a quar­tet of witches. Mind­healer is the only book that takes place out­side of San­ti­ago City, which seems to be the pri­mary set­ting for all of Saintcrow’s nov­els (from what I’ve read in their descriptions).

Theodora, earth witch and healer, runs the Caul­dron, an occult book and sup­ply store. Mari­amne Niege (water witch, prog­nos­ti­ca­tor) and Elise Nichol­son (fire witch) work for her in addi­tion to being, respec­tively, a grad­u­ate stu­dent and a musi­cian. Suzanne (air witch, I don’t believe we ever learn her last name) is Elise’s fos­ter mother and their teacher, some­thing of a high priest­ess to the lit­tle group.

The four women know that they’re psy­chic and that “mag­ick” is real. They don’t know that they are “Light­bringers,” that there are groups and crea­tures in the world that hunt them, or that a group called Cir­cle Light­fall trains and sends out “Watch­ers” to pro­tect (and recruit) Light­bringers in order to coun­ter­bal­ance the dark­ness in the world.

Watch­ers are for­merly wicked men with some psy­chic tal­ents who have been given a chance to redeem them­selves. They are bonded with a tanak, a dark sym­biote that gives them super­nat­ural speed, strength, heal­ing power, and longevity. The tanak also makes it pos­si­ble for them to sense dark­ness, but it causes the Watch­ers to expe­ri­ence pain when­ever they’re around Lightbringers.

The catch is that for every Watcher, there is one Witch whose pres­ence and touch will be intensely plea­sur­able instead of tor­tur­ous. The hope of find­ing that one witch is what keeps each Watcher going, fight­ing and sur­viv­ing hor­rific wounds for one chance at happiness.

The use of the tired soul­mate meme (though that spe­cific word is never used) is annoy­ing, and it detracts from what is oth­er­wise a fairly orig­i­nal con­cept. The fact that there are only male Watch­ers, though there are a few (mostly queer) male light­bringers, is a big­ger dis­ap­point­ment. The rea­son­ing given is that women do not have the vicious­ness to kill with­out hes­i­ta­tion. That’s sim­plis­tic, at best. Male light­bringers are also painted as weaker than females, and that, in com­bi­na­tion with the pedestal upon which Watch­ers place Light­bringers, unbal­ances the novels.

Theodora is the main sub­ject of the first book. Mari­amne is the focus of Storm Watcher. Fire Watcher, of course, is pri­mar­ily about Elise. We meet a new air witch, Anya Har­ris, in Cloud Watcher. And finally, Mind­healer is about Caro Rob­bins, whose brother plays a small part in Fire Watcher.

The books should cer­tainly be clas­si­fied as romances first, although they do have very strong para­nor­mal themes. Every book fol­lows the clas­sic romance novel for­mula. The fact that I kept read­ing despite my dis­like of romances is a tes­ta­ment to Saintcrow’s talent.

I sus­pect that the author either is pagan, or is very famil­iar with pagan prac­tices. The rit­u­als in each novel are nicely done, and I wouldn’t be sur­prised to hear peo­ple using some of the invo­ca­tions used in Circle.

I do have to pro­pose the Watcher drink­ing game. Take a shot every time there’s any men­tion of treat­ing a Watcher “dread­fully,” and every time a Watcher moans about how unwor­thy he is to be in the pres­ence of a Light­bringer. You’ll be past notic­ing any for­mu­lae in no time!

View all my reviews.

3 Comments »

  1. avatar Hope. 25 August 2008, 8:51 pm

    Love the drink­ing game idea :)

  2. avatar Chas. 25 August 2008, 11:55 pm

    Wow, talk about your pre­ten­tious goth names!

  3. avatar cyn. 26 August 2008, 11:06 am

    Yes, it’s a bit much :-)

 

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