Divine by Blood

Very bittersweet... I hate it when a series I love ends. So I'm happy for the story, and sad for the end of it. Beautifully written, as the rest of the books were as well. ( )

Avoid unless a teenage acting 35 year old married to a centaur is your cup of tea. ( )

In the beginning you find out that at the same time Shannon was having baby, Rhiannon was too. Rhiannon gave up her dark ways and sacrificed herself to save her daughter. Her daughter is sent to live with Richard Parker (Shannon's Dad). Divine by Blood is mostly about her story.

I have to admit that at first I was a little disappointed. I didn't get to see as much of Shannon as I would have liked. However, I did love the parts we did get, and her interaction with her daughter. It's really sad for me to say good bye to her. She has become one of my favorite fiction characters.

Once I got settled in to the story, Morrigan is a character I did enjoy. YA is my genre of choice, so it was nice reading about a young character again. She was raised in Oklahoma, and always knew she was different. Of course, every teenager feels that way at some point. But in her case it is real. There was a lot of magic in this one. Morrigan's magic was great to read about. One of them was the ability to hear whispers in the wind, and not all of the whispers were good. The evil wanted to take her as their own.

Kegan was a great character. I really enjoyed reading about him. Cast does a great job at creating couples you know are destined to be together, and you crave seeing them together. But my favorite character was Richard Parker. He was such a great guy. Cast said that he was written after her Dad. You can see how much of her heart she poured into his character, and it was impossible not to love him.

The story moves at a steady pace. I was entertained throughout. Though the ending was my favorite part. It was beautiful. Cast nicely wrapped everything up and left me satisfied. Throughout this trilogy, I have laughed, cried, shouted and felt every emotion imaginable. Cast has given me a beautiful world that I will be escaping to again. Now that I have finished this trilogy, I am excited to move on to Elphame's Choice and Brighid's Quest. Both books take place in Partholon, but have new, younger characters.

Divine by Blood was another win for me. I hope Cast continues to write, because I thoroughly enjoy her work. If you are an adult reader who is a fan of fantasy, you need to read this trilogy! ( )

This is a later book in a series. Spoilers for earlier books may follow.

In the third book chronologically in P.C. Cast's Partholon novels (fifth to be published, if you count the two books published earlier but set about a hundred years after the events of this book), Morrigan, just out of high school, discovers that her mother was not Shannon Parker as she has always been told, but Rhiannon MacCallan, Shannon's mirror image from a world of combined Celtic and Greco-Roman magic. She herself is then pulled into that world, where she discovers that she is a Light Bringer, gifted by a goddess in a way that has not been seen for three generations.

This is possibly the best of Cast's books. Anybody who has read one of her others will know where this book is going from the start, in a general sense. However, the path that she takes to get there and the specifics of the resolution are surprising. Fantasy and Romance readers alike should be pleased.

There are two reasons I did not rate this book higher than Divine by Mistake. First, for those who have read Divine by Choice, part one is somewhat awkward. We were lead to believe that Rhiannon had died at the end of the last book, only to find her living into the beginning of this one. The cover blurb (which is most likely not the author's fault) is misleading in this regard, as the statement that Morrigan is trapped in a tree throughout her gestation implies that she was born from the tree (in the style of various Greek myths where pregnant women are killed before the fetus is viable), rather than that her mother was trapped in the tree and expelled just in time to give birth. Second, there is P.C. Cast's fondness for pop culture references, which she trips over a bit in this book. Shannon Parker has been making contemporary pop culture references for the two previous books, and in part one of this one c. the births of Myrna and Morrigan. We know that part one of this book must take place within a few years of 2007. Therefore, Morrigan must be eighteen within a few years of 2025. Now, comic book heroes last for generations, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt that a teenager in 2025 might make X-Men references. But HBO's Rome? I'd find it depressing if I really believed that was the first thing a member of the Class of 2007 thought of in association with Classical clothing; when we're talking about the Class of 2025, it's too improbable even to be depressing. ( )