A FATE OF SMOKE AND ASH

A teenage girl discovers she’s a powerful witch and hurtles into a world of magic and deception in Scichilone’s YA fantasy series starter.

In North Carolina, Shivalri Acadia Grimsbane-Gray is a red-haired high school senior with a fiery personality. After her mother is killed in a horrible accident—an incident that’s followed by an earthquake and a reddened sky after she expresses her grief—and her father plunges into depression and heavy drinking, the teen decides that it’s time for her and her brother, Raidan, to leave. They pack up their late grandfather’s old car and seek refuge at their living grandmother’s mansion in the middle of the spooky, supernatural Grimsbane woods. Here, Gram reveals that Shivalri, Raidan, their cousin Satyra, and Gram herself are a clan of powerful witches—and that Shivalri may be the most powerful of all. Gram tells stories full of magic and history that build out the fictional world and lay the groundwork for future series installments. After Shivalri discovers that the veil separating the three realms of Earth, Heaven, and Hell disappeared, making way for demons, angels, and other supernatural entities to roam the planet, she knows that it’s her responsibility to step up and save her home. Over the course of the novel, debut author Scichilone delivers an exciting journey for teenage fans of supernatural lore and fantasy romance, and it kicks off the series with a running start. It’s full of well-researched lore, but it might have benefited from more attention to detail and more vivid description as the protagonist meets vengeful clans of witches, hobgoblins, and a daimon of the Dead. Also, despite its length of more than 300 pages, readers may feel that this fantasy tale is more rushed than they’d like.

A well-plotted effort but one that’s hampered by uneven execution.