Tracy’s review of Never Again
Welcome to Nevermore, Texas, population 503, where witches and wizards live side by side with humans, and where witch Lucy Rackmore is in trouble. Ever since her former lover snuffed out her magical abilities, everyone in town is looking to settle a score with her family. And Lucy’s only hope for survival may be her ex-brother-in-law-whom her sister betrayed and nearly killed.
Gray Calhoun was betrayed by his wife 10 years ago. His life changed dramatically and he’s kind of been hiding away in Nevermore, Texas. Though he is the town’s Guardian he hasn’t been doing such a bang-up job. When Lucinda Rackmore, the sister of his former wife, shows up on his doorstep he’ s more than happy to send her on her merry way. He gets a bit of a guilty feeling for sending her off in the pouring rain and decides that the least he could do was drive her to the bus station and buy her a bus ticket to wherever she was going next.
He doesn’t manage to find her right away though and when he does he finds her she’s magically trying to save the life of someone she hardly knows. And here he thought that all of the Rackmore family was uncaring. The problem with Lucy trying to use magic is that she’s cursed. Whenever she uses her specific type of magic she makes herself horribly sick. Gray attempts to help heal her by dreamwalking with her and during that time the two seem to form a bond with each other.
But the town of Nevermore has a whole slew of things happening that are far worse than Lucy and Gray, but it seems the two of them are smack dab in it and they’re really the only ones who can get the town and themselves out of danger.
This was a great first installment in what seems like it will be a thoroughly entertaining series. The town of Nevermore was quite intriguing. The town loyalty, the many different types of magics that the residents possessed, the non-magical folks called Mundanes…all of this thrown together to make a wonderful little hotbed of stories just waiting to be told. There were quite a few secondary characters as we got to know the townsfolk of Nevermore and they matched up quite nicely with my experience with small town residents. Everyone knows everyone else’s business before you can say boo but there was also the fierce protectiveness of each other that I loved.
Now the romance between Gray and Lucy was pretty good as it went along but it was really quite hard for me to believe Gray’s change of heart toward Lucy that was so quick. His previous wife had specifically married him in order to sacrifice him on altar for her demon lover. You don’t get over that kind of thing easily. Gray really hadn’t worked through it all in his head and it had been 10 years! Yes, he felt guilty about sending Lucy away initially but he quickly fell for her. I had a hard time reconciling that in my head but in the end it worked.
My only other niggle, besides the sudden romance initiation, was that there were a few things that were brought up to us as readers during the course of the story that we then heard nothing about after. I can only hope that we’ll hear more about these things in further books but it would have been nice to have it wrapped up in the book it was mentioned in. But maybe that’s just me. 🙂
I’m very much looking forward to the next book in this series, Now or Never, when it releases.
Rating: 4 out of 5
You can read more from Tracy at Tracy’s Place
This book is available from Signet. You can buy it here
