Wizard's Daughter

I finished Wizard's Daughter by Catherine Coulter this weekend. It was terrible. I'm not quite sure why I finished it, except that I have a weird thing about finishing books once I start them. There are only two books I have started and not finished, and I plan to go back and finish them someday - The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. We had started reading The Invisible Man my sophomore year of high school when the May 3 tornado hit and we were out of school for a week. There was another big project we were also doing at that time, so the teacher allowed us to either complete that project or do a report on the book and I did the project. I didn't have time to also finish the book because I was volunteering at church a lot. (The other project was to write and act out a monologue as an author and I picked C.S. Lewis.) I only read a few pages into The Killer Angels, which was our last assignment in senior English and we weren't even being tested over it or anything so a group of us just watched Gettysburg instead. I have both books and do plan to finish them some day.

Anyway, I'm supposed to be writing about Coulter's book. I've read a few of her romance and her mysteries and usually enjoy them, and I thought this would be a good one because I love Harry Potter and this had wizards. However, it was one of the most poorly written books I've ever read. I kept checking the flaps to see if it was a reprint of her first book or something, but it's not. Apparently she's just gotten lazy. That or she wrote this a million years ago and couldn't get it published and now that she can get anything published she cashed in on it. I never expect much from the plot of a romance novel, but this was laughable and didn't even make sense. And it was full of inspiring passages like this: "'This cannot happen, it cannot. My demon chant, none can overcome it, but you have killed me.' 'Yes,' he said. 'It is a very old, very powerful sword.'" Really? That's the death scene of the big villain? The whole thing reads like something a twelve-year-old would write, certainly not a celebrated author.