Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell

Lily Ivory is not your average witch. Her spell-casting powers tend to draw mischievous spirits while keeping normal humans at a distance. But now her vintage store could give her a chance to make friends in San Francisco.

Lily hopes for a normal life when she opens Aunt Cora's Closet. With her magical knack for vintage fashion—she can sense vibrations of the past from clothing to jewelry—her store becomes a big hit. 

But when a client is murdered and children start disappearing from the Bay Area. Lily may be the only one who can unravel the crime. She tries to keep her identity a secret while investigating, but it's not that easy—especially under the spells of sexy "myth buster" Max Carmichael and powerful witch Aidan Rhodes. Will Lily's witchy ways be forced out of the closet?

Secondhand Spirits (Witchcraft Mystery, book one) by Juliet Blackwell

Start date: Friday, July 25, 2014

End date: Sunday, July 27, 2014

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars 

First things first, I love the cover of this novel. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t pay much attention to the cover of a book when deciding whether to read it and that was the case when I decided on Secondhand Spirits. However, it would be wrong of me not to point out that the cover has glitter. Raised, sparkly mist surrounds the woman in pink to imply an overflowing amount of magic within her. But now that I’m looking at it again, I could see how someone might confuse the wispy smoke with a bad odor or extremely nasty gas.

Still. Glitter.

Throughout the first half of the book, I found myself rolling my eyes at how blatantly alike it was to another book I’ve read, Tall, Dark & Dead by Tate Hallaway. In the interest of fairness, I looked up the publication dates of the two novels. Tall, Dark & Dead came out in 2006, four years before Secondhand Spirits was published. Unless the similarities between the novels are merely coincidental, Juliet Blackwell likely copied Tate Hallaway, but I’ll leave it up to you, readers, to decide for yourselves.

The main character of Tall, Dark & Dead is Garnet Lacey, a witch on the run from Vatican witch hunters. She owns an occult bookstore and is friends with her sole employee, William, who she hides her witchy persona from despite his proclivities toward the occult. In the first chapter, a vampire comes to Garnet’s store looking for a rare herb, and a policeman comes to the store looking to ask Garnet questions concerning an ongoing investigation. Garnet is torn between the smoldering flame of love between her and her ex-boyfriend and the budding, smoking hot romance between her and the alchemist/vampire who walked into her shop. Garnet’s best friend is Izzy, a black woman who works at the café across the street from Garnet’s shop, which she patronizes every day.

The main character of Secondhand Spirits is Lily Ivory (what a name!), a born witch in hiding from her past and father for some reason. She owns a vintage clothing store and is friends with the woman, Bronwyn, who runs an herb store out of Lily’s store. Lily hides her witchy persona from Bronwyn despite the fact she’s a Wiccan. In the first chapter, a male witch (his words) comes to deliver an animal familiar to Lily, and a skeptical man comes looking for an herb, which Lily has to assist him with despite the fact the herb shop doesn’t belong to her. Lily is torn by her love/hate relationship with the male witch and finds herself falling for the skeptic. Lily’s best friend is Maya, a black(?) woman who Lily hired off the streets to scour the city for vintage clothes for her. Lily patronizes a café every day in order to feed the homeless young man who hangs around the area, Conrad, under the ruse of paying him to do menial tasks like sweeping the sidewalk in front of her store.

I’ll point out that like Undead and Unwed, this novel also deals with race in a strange way. Unlike MaryJanice Davidson, however, Juliet Blackwell describes many characters’ skin tones. Lily is of some Hispanic origin indicative by her tendency to sprinkle Spanish words into her internal monologue and knowledge of the Spanish folklore, La Llorona. Flashbacks of her grandmother, Graciela, speaking in Spanglish to her adds to the concept that she’s Hispanic, but her physical description is actually missing from the story, perhaps because it’s written in first person point of view. The many physical descriptions of characters fall short of describing skin tone in a couple of cases. Maya mentions that Frances Potts, an old woman she bought clothing from might have been “hung up on the color thing” but the color of Maya’s skin is never told to the reader so the full intent of her comment falls flat (Blackwell 193). Her physical description reads: “Twenty-three years old chronologically, but closer to forty on the cynicism scale, Maya had dark dreadlocks dyed bright blue at the ends, ears edged with silver rings and cuffs, and an aversion to makeup because, she’d explained earnestly, it was ‘too fake’” (Blackwell 8). Bronwyn’s description barely scratches the surface; she is “a plump woman in her mid-fifties…[with] fuzzy brown hair and warm brown eyes” (Blackwell 6-7). Then other characters get vivid descriptions. Max Carmichael:

He was tall and broad shouldered, with shaggy dark hair, olive skin, and a five-o’clock shadow. He wasn’t pretty like yesterday’s male witch; quite the contrary. He reminded me of a painting I had once seen in the Louvre of a battle-weary medieval knight who had just removed his armor…He couldn’t have been older than his late thirties, but his face displayed the lines and scars of an interesting life. His light gray eyes, startling in such a dark complexion, held a deep trace of sadness. (Blackwell 65-66)

Bonus points go to anyone who saw the similarity between Max’s description and Sinclair’s description from Undead and Unwed. Aidan Rhodes is “gorgeous: golden hair glinting in the light of the amber sconces, eyes the blue of a perfect periwinkle, tanned skin with just a hint of whiskers inviting one’s touch. Tall and graceful, he had the too-perfect, unreal beauty seldom seen outside a movie theater” (Blackwell 1). One woman’s description talks about her skin color in relation to drug use: “A skinny young blonde with the pallid complexion and hollow eyes of a drug user” (Blackwell 23). My mission in pointing out the inconsistencies in portrayals of characters is to enlighten the reader on how important a complete physical description is. If I can visualize the drug addict in the background of a scene but not the main character, you’re doing it wrong. I’ll move on now.

In my experience, you don’t just meet potential romantic partners simultaneously unless you actively seek them out, such as speed dating, online dating, anything “dating” because it implies an active pursuit. A lot of novels have love triangles but it seems like more often than not, novels with love triangles also have a female protagonist. Men seem to fall into the laps of these female protagonists, men who are so infatuated with these women that they don’t care how badly the women treat them—they’re like hyperactive puppies, seeking attention from whatever source they can get it from. Lily (and Garnet, for that matter) does not seek out partners; they pursue her. Let’s discuss her suitors.

Aidan Rhodes is a male witch who first appears in the novel when he shows up at Aunt Cora’s Closet, Lily’s antique clothing store, in the first chapter. He produces his business card, states that he knows Lily’s father (which has a negative effect on her), deposits her “housewarming gift” (a misshapen gargoyle-like creature meant to be her new familiar that may or may not be a spy), and leaves before she can react. Lily has a grudge against him because she believes he’s cast a spell to make him seem more likeable than he is. Their relationship is predictable to me. You may have encountered their type of relationship before in previous novels or real life. A woman rejects a man who is so good that he seems bad despite an allure she feels towards him. They usually have some sort of history, regardless of whether they realize it. He ends up doing a favor for her, leaving her in debt to him. She will most likely date another man in the meantime but she eventually realizes “the right man” was under her nose the whole time. They will not end up together, however, for mixed reasons, one of which might be because they’ve missed their window of opportunity. That’s exactly what happens in this novel (save for that last bit about her realizing what’s under her nose but it’s implied at the end). I’ve seen this in the Southern Vampire Mysteries series between Sookie and Bill, and I’ve also seen this in Tall, Dark & Dead between Garnet and Parrish, Garnet’s vampire ex-boyfriend who helps her hide the bodies of the Vatican witch hunters she killed.

From an outsider’s point of view, Aidan seems like a good match for Lily. She’s an incredibly powerful inborn witch, as is he. He has a wealth of magical connections around San Francisco that could benefit Lily who has recently moved there. He doesn’t question her even when she appears to be on a suicide mission. Lily even remarks about how much chemistry she can feel between them, but she denies any feelings she might have for him. She starts dating Max at the end of the novel, but the ending leaves the reader believing she might change her mind about Aidan.

Max Carmichael is a “mythbuster” who first appears in chapter five when he arrives at Aunt Cora’s Closet in search of herbs requested by his ghost tour guide, the local Charles Gosnold. (Charles’s story is actually quite interesting. He was a homeless youth living on the streets of San Francisco who saw how many tourists were interested in seeing the homes or former homes of celebrities. Seizing the opportunity to make money, he took tourists around town, making up stories about the celebrities who lived there. This evolved into him making up lively ghost stories about places in town, which turned into a business and good reputation for him.) Max makes uncovering supernatural phonies (like psychics, fortunetellers, etc.) his job, making no bones about telling Lily that he’s going to “out” Charles as a fraud. Lily, knowing that La Llorona is lurking around the bay, tries to warn Max from venturing out there with Charles, who knows nothing about how to handle actual ghosts. She succeeds in piquing his interest. Two police officers then enter the shop, one of which who knows Max, and ask Lily a series of questions that in the real world would have been asked in a small room at the police station, not out in the openness of Lily’s vintage clothing store.

Lily and Max’s relationship follows an inevitable path. They start by sharing a mutual attraction that results in light flirting. Max makes the first move by staying by Lily’s side when she breaks into Frances Potts’s house. Max is hurt in the house by an unseen force and Lily uses her magic to heal him back at her house. She returns his display of affection by cuddling him in his sleep. When Max wakes up and discovers her Book of Shadows, thereby finding out that she’s a witch, he flees. Days pass before they see each other again accidentally when Lily runs into Max at the newspaper office where he works. He asks her to explain her point of view so he can understand her better, proposing more intimacy in their relationship, which she accepts. From that point on, they’re keen on each other. The ending of the novel results in their first kiss together.  

I know all of this seems like I didn’t like the novel but I really did. There were aspects of the novel that I would have liked to see better handled like the physical descriptions of characters and the addition of a love triangle, which is why I discussed them in depth, but I enjoyed the plot with its twist ending and the culturally significant folklore. It’s a book worth reading for anyone who already read Tall, Dark & Dead by Tate Hallaway because Secondhand Spirits is a better rendition of the plot. If you’re someone who likes reading books about witches who aren’t necessarily Wiccan, then this book is for you. If you’d like to read a book with a female person of color protagonist, then this is it. If you’re someone who likes vintage clothing, this book is rife with descriptions of vintage clothing that went over my head because I’m a t-shirt, jeans and flip-flops kind of person. If you’d just like to read about a female spirit who captures children and drowns them as vengeance for her husband leaving her and her drowning her own children, then pick up this book.