Title The Wicked Deep Series --- Author Shea Ernshaw Cover Art --- Publisher Simon Pulse - 2018 First Printing Simon Pulse - 2018 Category Young Adult Warnings None Main Characters Penny Talbot, Bo, the Swan Sisters Main Elements Ghosts, Witches

Welcome to the cursed town of Sparrow…

Where, two centuries ago, three sisters were sentenced to death for witchery. Stones were tied to their ankles and they were drowned in the deep waters surrounding the town.

Now, for a brief time each summer, the sisters return, stealing the bodies of three weak-hearted girls so that they may seek their revenge, luring boys into the harbor and pulling them under.

Like many locals, seventeen-year-old Penny Talbot has accepted the fate of the town. But this year, on the eve of the sisters’ return, a boy named Bo Carter arrives; unaware of the danger he has just stumbled into.

Mistrust and lies spread quickly through the salty, rain-soaked streets. The townspeople turn against one another. Penny and Bo suspect each other of hiding secrets. And death comes swiftly to those who cannot resist the call of the sisters.

But only Penny sees what others cannot. And she will be forced to choose: save Bo, or save herself.

I discovered RivetedLit.com a few months back, where Simon & Shuster offers up free young adult books you can read online each month. Not every month is there a good selection of SF/F books, but being October, there were plenty to pick from, and probably more than I'll be able to squeeze in. Now I'd only heard of one of them before, and that was a zombie tale which is not my favorite genre. Not knowing what any were really about, I went with the one with the prettiest cover.

You can't judge a book by it's cover I'll admit, but this one lived up to it. In a small town on the Pacific coast of the United States there once were three sisters. They ran a perfume shop, but also had a reputation of bewitching the men of the village. Eventually the townsfolk decided that the girls must be witches, casting spells to get husbands to cheat on their wives (heaven forbid one blames the men for not keeping their pants on), and decided to drown them as punishment. And thus the curse, the sisters now come back once every year for a period of a month, inhabiting the bodies of girls in the village, and luring boys to the sea to be drowned. Of course, jump to modern day, and it has become a tourist attaction, the deaths notwithstanding (after all, boys will be boys and accidents happen, it's not a really a curse, right?)

Anyway, as I read the book it felt a lot like the Hocus Pocus movie with Bette Middler. A kind of classic Halloween tale (though The Wicked Deep takes place in June) of a cursed village, where the adults are mainly useless, so the kids need to save the day. And exactly because it felt kind of like a classic kind of tale, I really enjoyed it. There was a bit of creep factor but wasn't scary. You had the sceptics and the believers. You have the small town and the festival, I live in a big city and we don't have any "get everyone in the town square and dress up" kind of events, and thus it adds to my sense of how Halloween should be. And there was an interesting twist that I sorta saw coming but...ok, I'll be honest, its not the first time I've run into this twist and with a first person narrator it actually doesn't work at all. But if you get past the reveal that shouldn't be a reveal since you were in the person's head so as a reader you should have been aware from day one since the narrator is perfectly aware, then it made for an interesting twist after all. Hope I don't give too much away here...After all, unlike the Hocus Pocus movie, the sisters weren't in fact evil, and while they probably pushed a few more limits than they should have, they didn't deserve what they got.

And sure, the end isn't a surprise either, you don't write a book about the 200 years where nobody could figure out how to break the curse, you're going to write about the year someone does. But it is still a question of how, and who, and what price will need to paid.

So as a story to read during the month of October in preparation of Halloween, this one gave me all the vibes I wanted to have. I don't like outright give me nightmares horror, but a little bit of magic, a little bit of darkness, and a good old curse will be exactly what I'm looking for.