Rating: 4 stars (Spotlight Review)
U. S. Air Force Sergeant Christine Canady (aka CC) turned a quarter of a century old today, and today isn’t going anywhere near how she thought it would. Her best friend didn’t call her. CC receives a message soliciting her for gifts for an acquaintance’s birthday. And to top things off, her own parents forgot her birthday. Foiled in her attempts at keeping to her family tradition of celebrating the three birthday food groups (champagne, her mother’s home-baked chocolate chip cookies, and Kentucky fried chicken), CC attempts to make the best of her birthday solo.
CC decides make some major changes in her life and to celebrate this next phase, she starts off by dressing in silky lingerie, gorging on KFC and getting gloriously drunk. While soused, our heroine tears through her old college texts to find an earth ritual that she reenacts on her balcony, and requests the goddess Gaea to grant her magic in her life.
Then reality hits the next morning: CC has to fly to another assignment. The ultimate irony: this Air Force Sergeant has a fear of flying. She attempts to shake off her memories of the ritual, but she is given signs throughout the day that magic is in the air around her.
Then CC’s plane goes down, and she has no choice but to believe that magic has become a part of her life as Undine herself comes to her with a proposal she has no choice but to accept.
An addictive read, I finished this yummy novel in one record session. One of the things that caught my interest was that Gaea successfully interacts with the cast throughout more than one religious model in a believable fashion. Discussions of the trio of maiden, mother and crone blend seamlessly in a setting with a Virgin Mary statue and Gaea herself. Great kudos to Cast there.
The author did a wonderful job of illustrating a struggle that exists in much of us with Undine. I would have wished that the Sea God Lir had made more of a showing, but understand why that wasn’t so.
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ISBN: 978-0-425-22688-9
October 7, 2008, through Berkley Sensation