Book Review: Dime Store Magic

I found Kelley Armstrong's, Dime Store Magic a few days ago. It's definitely worth sharing.  Armstrong is quite an accomplished author with a long list of publications. Dime Store Magic is from her "The Otherworld Series". 

The main character in Dime Store Magic is a witch. But unlike witch characters in a lot of other series, Paige is very modern and firmly entrenched in the new world as well as the old. She has very modern and typical issues including self esteem, self-employment, diet, exercise and of course, like all good witches; romance. Although she's only in her mid-twenties she has "inherited" a teenager and therein lies a host of problems!

Her teenage dependent is also a witch, but  unlike Paige, her newly acquired "daughter"  comes from a line of black magic practitioners. Paige struggles with her own thoughts about this and where to draw the line. Like many parents, Paige really has to figure out how she should adapt to her daughter's abilities.  Paige struggles to allow evolution while maintiaining core values, accept talents from the next generation she might not even understand, and nurtur her child in a safe environment with appropriate boundaries and guidance.

Paige also discovers that even within the protective confines of a closely knit Coven, fear of the unknown and unusual can penetrate the ranks and destroy the group. As Paige accepts the talents, abilities and ideas of her daughter, she finds her own world expanding and evolving. That expansion is not always met with acceptance from  her own group of friends and mentors..Hmm...

Dime Store Magic is from Armstrong's, "The Otherworld Series", but I found myself finding the plot line only too believable in this world as well. There is a wild cast of characters including Demons and Half-Demons as well as witches with multiple talents. But these talents and character types don't complicate the reading of the story. It's easy to follow, believable in nature, with just the right amount of magic to be pleasantly distracting and non-disturbing.

Armstrong has an amazing website that any author would be proud of. It's an interesting read in itself.  If you get confused on the characters' abilities you can just reference Demonology 101 on her website and get the summary. http://www.kelleyarmstrong.com/extras/

Armstrong truly has created a whole other world, but she's brought real life issues to that world and in my opinion there is more than a few lessons to be learned from her writing that could be applied in the here and now.

One of those lessons might just be that as we expand our minds we enter into a new realm of possibilities. Perhaps rather than labeling things and events in our lives as good or bad, white or black, we should consider abilities and challenges as opportunities for growth. Maybe if we stopped attaching labels and trying to categorize everyone and everything into  "good" or "bad", "us" and "them" we could eliminate underlying fear and go with the flow.

Perhaps that's when we can find our true power.  Who knows, maybe you too have a spell or two within you just waiting to be properly cast!