Book Review / A Chalice of Wind by Cate Tiernan

Separated since birth, 17-year-old twins Thais and Clio unexpectedly meet in New Orleans where they seem to be pursued by a coven of witches who want to harness the twins' magical powers for its own ends.

Published:     18th August 2005
Publisher:  Razorbill
Goodreads :  Click here
Series or Stand-Alone:  Book 1, Balefire
Source:  Owned

MY REVIEW

What I loved about this book...  This bind-up has been on my shelf for absolutely ages.  I think I may have bought it when it was published but I can't say for certain because that is how long it has been sitting on my shelf!  With four books in the series, each only being 200ish pages long I thought I would finally give this a go!

Let's start with the parts that I liked, Cate Tiernan is the author of one of my favourite young adult series - the Sweep series so I was really excited to be getting back into her writing and seeing what she came up with as this series was written after the Sweep series finished.  What I liked the most was the history and mystery.  Right from the beginning of this book I had a real sense of the history of the world.  A feeling that there is a lot more to the story than what meets the eye and I definitely wasn't wrong with that one.  There is so much to learn about the people around Thais and Clio (and even Thais and Clio themselves have a lot to reveal, some of which they didn't even know themselves!)   There are a lot of secrets here and I was very intrigued to find out how this one played out.

What I didn't like about this book...  Honestly, despite the above I felt the story dragged a bit and was very slow moving.  For me if the story had been faster paced I might have only taken a few hours to finish it rather than nearly a week.  I think the pace was partly to do with it but if I am being honest I simply wasn't feeling the story.  This is definitely a book that I am going to pick up again at a later point to see how I feel about it and I am definitely going to give the second book in this series a try but I hope that I can get into it a lot more.