Carolyn MacCullough

*****This review may contain spoilers if you didn't do what I told you to previously and read Once a Witch. Continue at your own risk.****

Now, whereas I did not like Tamsin in Once a Witch, I'm loving her in this one. Not only is she looking out for herself, her family and their fate, but she's looking out for the servants in the Knight household and the poor urchins they experiment on. While Once a Witch went back and forth between light and dark, Always a Witch reads like a horror story. show more The Knight family, is bent on practicing the darker magics. And they don't care about spilling human blood to do it. Humans are considered beneath them and therefore if they kill one or two dozen for the cause, so be it. What do they want? Immortality.

Tamsin travels back in time without Gabriel, time affects those without her powers and he could die if he gets trapped back in time. She has to beat Alistair Knight back in time before he can warn the Knights of what the Greene family did to their powers. Now here, she did go off a little half assed if you ask me because once again, she didn't know where the Greene family lived before she went back in time. That would have been my first place to visit. And I would have known the names of my ancestors so they would believe me. Had some piece of information or heirloom so they could identify me. But there's a big reason she can't ask where they lived or find out names and again in a round about way it has to do with Alistair Knight. So she basically hits the late 1800's blind. Dressed in a working girl's uniform and that's about it. She was smart enough to look in the attic at home for a uniform or dress so she'd look the part and found some money as well.

Tamsin of course, snoops and gets caught, but now with her awesome powers, she thinks she's invincible. Not! Once again, Gabriel comes to her rescue. And her great, great grandfather.
There are lots of mysteries and betrayals in this book and just when you think you've got it figured out, the loophole closes and there's no way out. Gabriel is just as admirable in this book as in the last one and still, my favorite character, but as I said, Tamsin is a lot less whiney and more take charge in this one.

At the end, as things turn around, Tamsin suffers a terrible loss and becomes the ultimate heroine to me! She totally makes up for her mistakes in Once a Witch, and who knows, maybe it was fated for this to all happen this way anyway.

I really enjoyed this novel. I love time travel novels and most of this one takes place in the past. There is a lot of sleuthing and sneaking around, second guessing, a lot of surprising defeats and some very realistic hopelessness. As to whether there is a happy ending, you'll need to read it, but I happily and highly recommend this book and the series. show less

The best adjective I can come up with to describe Once a Witch would have to be adventurous. Tamsin travels through time more than once, she commutes to and from boarding school, and between all that traveling, she has to put up with her crazy family and solve a mystery. Phew! Once a Witch is very busy, but Carolyn MacCullough manages to write in a way that makes the multitude of characters and various plotlines manageable.

My favorite aspect of the book would have to be Tamsin. She’s a show more smart aleck, she’s got a cynical outlook on life, and she does whatever the heck she wants. Her personality made reading her story quite entertaining, and definitely made her feel more realistic. Because Tamsin was raised as an outsider, her moodiness and constant sarcasm really make a lot of sense.

Another part of Once a Witch that I liked was its fantasy feel. Because of Tamsin’s big family and the time traveling, the book just felt magical! It didn’t have that feeling of still being grounded in the real world, which I enjoyed! Carolyn MacCullough’s writing contributed to the fairy-tale quality of Once a Witch; her writing wasn’t super hip (no excessive cursing, not too much slang), so it felt distant from today’s world. This sounds like an insult, but it isn’t! I enjoyed MacCullough’s style of writing; it was a nice change of pace.

Once a Witch was an amazing ride, and I enjoyed every bit of it. It reminded me a little bit of Nikki Christina Hoffman’s A Fistful of Sky (the talented family and a talent-less protagonist), which was great, since I had really enjoyed that book as well. I’d recommend Once a Witch to fantasy lovers, and people who like to read about crazy families and their secrets.
(Originally posted to 365 Days of Reading) show less

Tamsin Greene has lived under suffocating familial expectations her whole life. Upon her birth, her grandmother prophetized that she would be the most powerful witch their family has ever known. Instead, Tamsin’s Talent never revealed itself, and she’s forced to be the embarrassment of her family, forever watching her perfect older sister Rowena get all the attention.

When a stranger, a professor at NYU, comes into her family’s bookstore and mistakes her for Rowena, Tamsin realizes this show more is her opportunity to prove to the world that she she can live up to her family name. The stranger asks her to locate a long-lost prized family heirloom, but the deeper Tamsin goes to find the object, the more she discovers that the stranger’s intentions may not be all that benevolent, and that he is somehow tied to her family’s past…

ONCE A WITCH is a fast-paced and engaging story filled with magic, danger, and family secrets. It’s easy to get caught up in this extremely readable novel.

Tamsin is a charming protagonist, simultaneously determined yet vulnerable. She narrates her family’s story with an ease that draws us into her world. Similarly, all of the other characters are subtly introduced and developed, so that we never feel as if the Greene family’s world is contrived, but rather as if they could be living among us.

The plot is a little unsteady but still ultimately satisfactory. It was horrifying to see how some characters changed as a result of contact with the villain—but, like I said earlier, I appreciated its naturalness. Most events in the novel flowed like they had to happen under those circumstances.

That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t some aspects of ONCE A WITCH that felt overdone or cliché. These include Tamsin’s sidekick and love interest, Gabriel, the time travel scenes, and the way various characters occasionally, prophetized to explain backstory. These minor slip-ups are easy to overlook in light of my larger enjoyment of the whole book, though. Those who like a little magic and mystery in their books will love ONCE A WITCH, and even those who don’t normally delve into urban fantasy/paranormal fiction will find Tamsin’s story an easy and delightful read. It seems like there is a good chance of there being a sequel, which I will definitely be looking forward to! show less

When I first started reading this book I felt so gosh darn badly for Tamsin as her story is quite sad. She was the only person in her family (and a large family at that) who was born without a Talent and as such she was seen as the black sheep of the family. Therefore when a man, Alistair Callum, came to her family’s bookstore in the hopes of hiring someone to aid him in finding a family heirloom I think I may have jumped at the chance to prove to her family her worth faster than Tamsin show more herself did. But then when it became apparent that Alistair was looking for help from Tamsin’s sister Rowena and not Tamsin therefore leading to Tasmin pretending to be her sister I just couldn’t help thinking to myself, “Tamsin are you sure this is a good idea? This sounds like it could end similarly to when some brainless female from a horror story hears a weird noise outside and goes out to check it out knowing that there is a serial killer outside and gets her head hacked off by said serial killer”.

Tamsin was completely different from the female characters that I typically read (ie. girly girls who get introduced to the paranormal world by either their love interest or when they discover that their life is a gigantic lie and they are some paranormal being themselves), with her chain-smoking-when-stressed,-vintage-clothing-shop-lover,-artistic-and-the-likes-of-tendencies and I really did appreciate her uniqueness.

As soon as Carolyn wrote that when Tamsin was biking home and ran into a person who emitted a male “Oomph” I felt like we were in for a treat and that said male would become a love interest- and boy were we ever in for a treat! To describe said boy (Gabriel) in one word? Hot. But more than that he was just such a sweet guy and super caring (I mean how many guys would write to their female friend that they left behind years beforehand when his parents moved him across the country and when he returned he was upset with his female friend for not responding to his letters?)... But I just felt like Tamsin was super hard on him and on occasion anti-Gabriel and more than once in the story I felt like shaking Tamsin and screaming at her, “Gabriel is such a nice guy who is clearly in love with you SO WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN TO HIM? WHY DON’T YOU JUST THROW HIM A BONE AND GIVE HIM A CHANCE?!?” Anyways, Gabriel? Super swoon-worthy!

Furthermore the world of witches that Carolyn created I thought was really quite unique, unlike I have ever read before (all of the various Talents that everyone had? Super cool! I don’t think that there would be a single one that I would be unhappy with having). My biggest complaint (aside from Tamsin being unappreciated of Gabriel and all he had to offer) was the action. I felt like the first ¾ of the story were a bit slow and when the action did pick up it lasted only a handful of pages.

All in all, I do think that it was a good YA read and that the world in which Carolyn has created is super unique. Also, this book doesn’t follow the stereotypical YA plot line (love triangle, disappearing parents, and the likes of) so yay for that! show less