Title: Catching A Sorcerer
Author: Sara Walker
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Audience: Young Adult
Formats: Paperback and E-book
Publisher: Sara Walker
Cover by: Melody Simmons
Pages: 198
ISBN-10: 1491049804
ISBN-13: 978-1491049808
ASIN: B00CTLG5A2
Date Published: May 2013
Summary:
After a sorcerer kills her mother, fifteen year old Melantha is asked to help catch him. She wants
nothing to do with it, but then she learns one of her classmates is the son of the sorcerer. With her spell
turner powers not yet developed, the mission will be dangerous, but it will be downright deadly if the
sorcerer figures out who she is and decides she will
follow in her mother's footsteps.
Book Links:
Review :
"He would never stop. There would never be enough power for him. Death meant nothing to him. He only wanted life. And at that moment he wanted my life."
Melantha is a witch whose mother has been murdered by an evil sorcerer. The Council while investigating her mother's death come seeking Melantha's help to further their plan to finding proof of a suspect. Melantha's gran is very strict and doesn't allow her to make any friends saying they could be used against her in this world filled with evil doers. Little did Melatha know how right her gran would turn out to be! But when the help Mel is seeked for requires her to befriend the guy named Savion to whom nobody even speaks to kindly, what is she gonna do? On top of that him being the son of the evil sorcerer,how is she ever gonna pull this off without seeing suspicious?
I really enjoyed being inside Mel's head. She was funny, sarcastic,kind, brave and everything else she needed to be. Then there is Paul.I totally loved him. It might be weird with him being a cricket and all, but he sure was a hilarious one. I enjoyed the banter between Mel and him too much. I had a hard time stopping my laughs with him in the picture.
Paul let out a loud, "Shhhhh!"
"You 'shhh'!" I whispered. "You're louder
than the stairs."
"Hmph." He dropped into the box, turned his
back on me and curled up in the corner, glaring just before he turned his face away.
I shook my head. A cricket that was a drama queen. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.
The plot was really interesting, I mean there is magic involved, people! What more do you need?? :D
The pace of the story was good and the overall story was real fun to read. I'm glad I went for Catching A Sorcerer. It was an entertaining read which at the end will make you happy.
Rating : 4/5 Stars
Excerpt :
Sunday night and I was learning to turn a summoning spell. Though I'd spent most of my life being
home schooled, I had a feeling this was not a normal family activity for other fifteen year old girls.
"Gran, when I told you I wanted a cell phone, this wasn't what I had in mind," I said.
Gran picked through a handful of wheatberries, looking for just the right one to add to her pot.
We stood at opposites sides of the round table with a copper pot in front of each of us and a host of
ingredients filling the table between.
"Cell phones don't work for members of the magical community," she said.
"What community? It's just you and me."
Dumping ingredients into a pot had nothing on the convenience of electronic communication. Kids
at school were constantly using theirs to call each other, text, watch videos. But not me. I wasn't allowed
to have one. I had to learn the "old ways."
Gran sighed, and I knew by the way her lips were pursed that she didn't intend to elaborate. She'd
been trying to get me to learn spells every night for weeks now. I'd finally caved in hopes she would back
off, but that plan hadn't worked out quite like I'd hoped.
"I have to go to the library tonight," I said. I dumped a handful of crispy dried lavender flowers—
for devotion so the line of communication would stay clear— into my pot.
In another time we might have been called witches. But now that term was considered derogatory.
We were spell-turners. Well, Gran was. I wouldn't be a full spell-turner until I turned sixteen and came
into my full powers. In all my fifteen years, in all the time I'd spent in Halifax and my current residence in
Ottawa, I'd never met another turner, not another magical creature of any kind, until the day my mother
died.
If there was a magical community out there, I wouldn't know it.
I hadn't been out of the apartment except to go to school in six weeks. I needed to get away, to
hang with some friends— even just for a little while.
"We have books here," Gran replied in a stern tone. This was an old argument.
She was right— we had books here. Every wall of the living room was filled to the ceiling with
shelves, every shelf filled with books. All had belonged to my mother.
Without coming right out to say so, Gran was subtly reminding me of the reason I was confined to
the apartment. My mother had been killed by a black-spell sorcerer— that is, a sorcerer who chooses to
use death to fortify his spells. For some reason Gran thought he would come after me. But I wasn't a full
turner yet. I had only partial powers. Until my sixteenth birthday, every spell I turned would dissipate
the moment it came together. "Learning powers," Gran called them. "Just enough juice to see what you're
doing, but not so much as to harm yourself or anyone else."
She seemed convinced I had these learning powers, but for some reason my spells never seemed
to turn out right no matter how carefully I followed her instructions. And that was bad news. Even though
they didn't want me to know, I'd heard my mother and Gran fighting about me. Gran thought I was either
a late blooming white turner or a null— a turner's daughter born without powers. My mother refused to
believe I was a null. So Gran was on a mission to prove one way or another I had learning powers or I was
deliberately faking not having them out of extreme laziness.
"Your mother was a good white turner," Gran said. "She loved turning spells with me when she
was your age. Couldn't get enough of it."
Her mention of my mother hit me square in the gut.
"Didn't she like to do anything else? Anything normal?"
Gran pinched her lips together again. She didn't like to speak about my mother beyond her gifted
spelling abilities.
I directed the conversation back to the topic at hand.
"I really need the books at the library," I said. I followed her actions and, using a wooden spoon,
swirled in two cups of diluted bay leaf extract for strength. I turned the spell clockwise, same as she did.
We were on opposite sides of the small round kitchen table, so I had to think for a minute which way to
turn my spoon.
"Why?" Gran asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes. Everything was suspicious to Gran.
I barely kept myself from rolling my eyes. "I have homework."
"What homework?"
"What do you mean? I go to high school now. I get homework." I used to be home-schooled. Right
up until 52 days ago when I lost my mother. Then Gran had to take over as my teacher. She used to be
able to teach my lessons for the few months of the year when I went to live with her in Halifax, but now
that I was in grade ten, my studies had advanced to the point where she didn't understand anything in my
textbooks. So she marched me down to the nearest high school. She would have signed me up right then,
but they were closed for winter holidays. Imagine that.
"The new semester starts tomorrow, February second, according to the literature I received from
the school," she pointed out.
Crap. "I'm catching up from last semester," I said, carefully examining a handful of calendula. I felt
more than saw Gran carefully examining me.
"Who's the boy?" she asked.
"There's no boy," I answered quickly. Too quickly. Double crap.
"I might not know much about quadriplegic equations or—"
"Quadratic equations," I corrected.
"Or, what goes into a good Theseus statement, but—"
"Thesis statement. Theseus killed the Minotaur."
"But," she said again with emphasis, ignoring my corrections, "I know my granddaughter."
This time I did roll my eyes. "Whatever."
His name was Rory Macdonald. But I wasn't about to tell Gran that. I met him in the principal's
office on the morning of my first day. It was his first day, too. A drunk driver had killed his parents and
now he was living with his aunt. I met him again later in the day at the guidance counsellor's office. A
special grief counsellor had been brought in to meet with us. Neither of us wanted to meet with her, but
nobody asked us. His aunt was almost as controlling as my Gran.
We didn't have plans for tonight, so I didn't have to worry about calling him to cancel. He'd
mentioned he'd found this place, where he liked to go on Sunday nights to play bass guitar for a band. I'd
only hoped to stop in and hear him play.
"You may invite him to come here," Gran said, ignoring my denials. She released three drops of
cedar oil, for dedication, into the liquid swirls in her pot. "But you won't be going out."
I bit back a scream. It used to be my mother and Gran had no trouble keeping friends out of my
life, what with shipping me off to Halifax twice a year and homeschooling me. I never got to go to birthday
parties, Halloween parties, camping trips or any other fun thing that normal girls did.
"Friendship is dangerous," Gran would say. My mother would agree. She would even agree when
they were having that big fight that lasted for weeks.
I tried a new angle. "I need to use the computers at the library."
"What do you need those confounded contraptions for?" she asked. Her tone was one of surprise,
even though this wasn't the first time we'd talked about my needing a computer for schoolwork. She just
didn't get the concept of computers. Ever.
I listed the reasons on my fingers. "Research, report presentation, statistical analysis—"
"Hmph. In my day we had to do all of that by hand." She peered down her nose at the runny swirls
in my pot. While mine was little more than a pathetic soup stock, hers had taken on shimmering hues of
purple and green. I didn't have to see her face to know she was disappointed.
Still, I pressed my case. "Look, it's not a big deal. I can take care of myself."
"Hmph." She tapped the wooden spoon on the pot rim.
"Please? Can I go for an hour?" Oh, man. That sounded so desperate.
"No," she said simply, placing her spoon on the table next to her pot. She carried the empty vials to
the sink and turned on the hot water.
"Gran—" I cried.
"I cannot permit it, Melantha. If you do not go outside this apartment with me, then you do not go
outside this apartment at all."
I rolled my eyes and groaned. "You are completely impossible!"
If my words stung even the slightest, she didn't show it. She carried on with washing the
dishes. "I'm sorry, Melantha. But I promised your mother."
"Promised her what? Promised you would keep me a prisoner and never talk about her?"
I slumped into a chair with my arms crossed. This was hopeless. Gran was super stubborn. I
needed a new approach.
Temporarily abandoning my potion, I snagged the tea towel on the way to the sink. Unexpected
helpfulness always put Gran in a good mood. I hoped it would be good enough to let me out.
She cleared her throat. "Your potion is incomplete."
"My potion is nothing but water with twigs and leaves in it." I noticed she didn't tell me not to
dry the dishes. Nor did she tell me to start over and make the potion again. We'd been down that road
before. It always resulted in the same thing: failure. Whatever it took to make a potion, I didn't have it.
My mother and Gran had been convinced my spells would come together the closer I got to my sixteenth
birthday, but so far they always amounted to nothing.
"Did you project your light into it?" she asked in that snippy tone that said she already knew the
answer.
"Yes." I hated it when she said "light" instead of "magic".
"And?" Gran prompted.
"And what? Nothing happened." I shrugged. I felt my power, my magic. It flowed through me, the
same as blood and oxygen flowed through me. It was there. I could feel it the entire time we put together
these spells. But magic also dredged up too many memories of my mother. And there wasn't much light
there when I thought about how she died. It was more like a choking sensation. I hated that feeling.
"You're not trying hard enough," Gran said. That was what she always said. I didn't answer. There
was no point. She'd already made up her mind.
Maybe the truth was, I could have tried harder, but turning spells just felt wrong. If my mother had
been killed by bullets, would I still be expected to attend target practice?
"I don't understand what's so bad about having friends," I said, plucking a soapy plate from the
drain board.
She shut off the water. "You know the reason. They can be used against you. And you against them.
It's better for everyone if you just don't have them to begin with."
Yeah, I'd heard that part before. It was stupid. For some reason my mother and Gran thought I
would be kidnapped and held for ransom. I couldn't understand why. We didn't have anything of value. It
wasn't like we were millionaires.
So who were they protecting me from?
"As for going out alone," Gran continued as she washed a pot, "there are many kinds of evil out
there. You are not safe on your own."
"But I won't be on my own. I'll be with friends!"
"Together you'll be on your own."
"But that makes no sense at all!"
An eerie wind howled outside the windows. If the weather was getting worse, I was sure to lose
this argument. I crossed the apartment to the living room windows and used the tea towel to clear away
the condensation on the cold glass. Snowflakes swirled under the streetlights below. Even the weather
wanted to keep me inside.
There was a sharp knock at the door. I met Gran's gaze. She appeared as surprised as I was, but
where I welcomed any and every visitor, I knew she would send away whoever was on the other side
of that door. By the expression on her face, she suspected I'd invited a friend over without permission. I
hadn't, but knowing Gran, that wouldn't make a difference.
I dove for the door, but Gran beat me to it. She leaned cautiously up to the peephole.
"Open up, Alberta. I'm here to speak to the girl." It was a man's voice— muffled, old and tired. The
voice of someone older than Gran, someone ancient.
The girl? I hoped for his sake, he wasn't referring to me. There was something familiar about
the voice, something that sent a nervous sense of foreboding all the way down to my toes. This was one
visitor I didn't want to see.
About The Author :
A former bookkeeper, Sara always preferred books over numbers, and finally put aside her calculator to write stories and work part-time in a library. She is the founder of
UrbanFantasyLand.net, a website established in 2008 that specializes
in promoting urban fantasy and speculative fiction. Her articles and
fiction have been published in anthologies and online.
*Giveaway*
*Giveaways*
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