Last week I believed we were three weeks away from the SPELLCASTER launch. Wishful thinking, I guess, because the book will be out one week from today. One week! Yes, I can get done with my revisions and pack for tour in time, hahahahahaha oh please someone help me.
AHEM. Maybe we should continue with the character sketches for SPELLCASTER, moving onto our next character — our lead character — Nadia Caldani.
As this is a series about witchcraft, you will probably, perhaps, just maybe have picked up on the fact that the MC is a witch. But she won’t discover witchcraft in the first book, or unlock a secret power she never knew she had. Nadia not only knows she’s a witch but is prouder of it than anything else in her life. Yes, sometimes it’s tough, having to keep something so important a secret … but that’s one of the rules Nadia lives by. The First Laws of the Craft are sacred, and one of them forbids her to reveal the Craft to any woman who might betray it. Another tells her she may never speak of it, ever, to any man. Her dad and little brother remain oblivious to her powers, even though they’ve had to become closer these past few months.
Why? A few months before the start of the book, Nadia’s mother — her one and only teacher in the Craft — suddenly left the family. Not only does Nadia feel as hurt and abandoned as anyone else would by that, but she also has no further way to progress in her studying. She’s on the verge of this tremendous power, on more or less “graduating” to the level of witchcraft she’s worked for and aspired to all her life, and now she’s just … stuck. Although Nadia is determined to teach herself more, she questions how much farther she can go on her own. She wishes she could find another teacher but isn’t sure how to go about it. And she feels betrayed by her mom, by the friends who didn’t know how to stand by her when she was hurting, and maybe by the whole idea of love. (See, Nadia always thought of her parents as a perfect couple, people who had the kind of marriage everyone dreams of. Her friends always talked about how much her parents seemed to just like each other, while their moms and dads seemed to yell all the time. If that could fall apart, anything could fall apart, right?)
But then her father, hoping to give the family a fresh start, moves them all to the small town of Captive’s Sound, Rhode Island. Nadia doesn’t feel like trying to make new friends, or branch out at all. She’s going to power through her senior year, keep her head down and help take care of her brother Cole, who’s had a rough time since Mom’s been gone. Sounds like a plan.
Of course, that plan goes up in flames the second (I mean, the very second) she enters Captive’s Sound. Nadia immediately realizes a mysterious power is at work here — a magic infinitely greater and more dangerous than her own. She isn’t yet strong or experienced enough to face that, but she has to. There’s no one else.
And she meets Mateo, whose life has also been affected by magic in very different ways, and who may make Nadia believe in love all over again.
(Don’t worry: Mateo’s character sketch will be up soon!)
