BINGO – Gaslight
Sisters Edwina and Mary Blackwood have to move around quite a bit. Any time their neighbors catch wind of what they really are, they must move. Witches aren’t the most tolerated group of people in Victorian England (hence the gaslight). Edwina has the innate ability to find shiny objects and her sister Mary can capture the memories of morals which she only tries to do right before they pass on. Unfortunately Mary accidentally took the memories of a detective who was not near death but only severely impaired. Edwina resolves to help this detective restore his memories and help him track down a serial killer, no matter the cost.
I loved Luane G. Smith’s The Vine Witch Series. Those books had wonderfully enjoyable and fully formed characters that drew me in immediately with a delight magic system. I was very excited for this novel, but something felt off. The magic is never fully formed enough or the characters aren’t. Despite Edwina and Mary’s troubled childhood and their odd gifts, I never got to a point of caring about their history nor their sibling relationship. Or it’s possible that the relationship between magic and character is never solidified in a meaningful way. The way they use music is dull until the very end when a new magical skill is introduced in order to make the title make sense. I don’t know. Nothing ever quite landed for me.
Unfortuantely, I did not enjoy this story, characters, or magic enough to read the second book in the duology. Nothing was bad; I just couldn’t connect with anything.