Evette Davis’s THE GIFT continues where The Others left off. Olivia Shepherd is reeling from the discovery that she’s half-witch and that her estranged father Gabriel is part of a council of powerful and magical world leaders. Olivia doesn’t want anything to do with this life of magic, but then she meets a tarot card reader named Nadia who informs her that embracing her power and duties will only help her and those around her. “A witch must embrace her strength. She reads the minds of the living and the dead and leads her people to their destiny,” Nadia says before revealing that Olivia has a dangerous enemy she must prepare for if she wants to survive. What readers will appreciate in this section is that the author organically recaps the events of Book One without affecting the pace. Readers are reminded of Elsa, a time-walker and spirit guide who has helped Olivia with her powers, as well as what a dangerous vampire named Nikola did to Olivia that caused her to run from her hometown of San Francisco, California to Budva, Montenegro.
But the revelation about her destiny and the sudden news that her mother was killed by Nikola drive her towards revenge. The real action of the book begins when Gabriel shares that Nikola plans to run for Council leader, which would essentially make him leader of both humans and nonhumans and allow him to conduct criminal activities without any accountability. Gabriel wants to collect evidence against him, so he sends Olivia to Serbia—a central point of Nikola’s business dealings—on a fact-finding mission under the guise of helping with the country’s elections. Before she knows it, Olivia jets off to Serbia and works on harnessing her power before she can face her biggest enemy and stop him from destroying the world.
Olivia’s European quest with her friends is a high-stakes adventure that offers equal parts escapism and emotion. Readers are thrust right into the thick of the plot, from a risqué party in Paris thrown by Nikola to an encounter with a werewolf that he presumably sends as a warning in San Francisco. The worldbuilding feels soft insofar that the Council, the organization around which the series is based, remains a mystery; and while there are plenty of magical creatures roaming the Earth, their origins and realm aren’t described at length. Still, the grounded fantasy plot is captivating and grapples with magical conflicts that have universal appeal—making it a good entry point for new fantasy readers. For one, while Olivia’s world now revolves around vampires and witchcraft, she’s also coming to terms with this new magical identity, her connection to her father, and the loss of her mother (with whom she had a fraught relationship). The romance is not central to the story and needs more development, but it gets steamy—as Olivia finds herself caught between two vampires and a human who promises a normal life.
Love triangles (or squares) can be hit or miss, but Davis approaches it by linking the love interests to different parts of Olivia’s identity: the half-human, the half-witch, and the woman. Olivia’s relationship with William seems awkward on the page; the scenes where they’re together get filled with tension and lack chemistry. “I wanted William’s love and support, but as usual they seemed to come with pain and complications,” she ponders early in the book. On the flip side, passion drives her mercurial relationship with his brother Josef. The enemies-to-lovers banter they develop in Serbia is electrifying, heightened by their forced proximity and Josef’s tendency to kiss Olivia in front of their enemies to disguise who they are. When she sees him talking to a woman at a bar in their hotel, she says to herself, “He can do what he likes. Still my stomach fluttered when I strolled into the wood-paneled bar and spotted Josef with a stunning woman at his side.”
This passion and “will they, won’t they” energy in their relationship stems from the evocative writing. Davis’s prose helps readers imagine what Olivia and her friends are facing, as well as the stakes in their personal relationships. Tension is aptly threaded into scenes where, for instance, Olivia is struggling to test her telekinetic powers on objects to see how much she can weaponize them. During a particularly gruesome battle with werewolves in the middle of a snowstorm, Olivia makes the snow move into “miniature tornadoes that covered the wolves’ dark pelts with white, the snow beating against their eyes so relentlessly that they began to back away.”
The way Olivia steps up in THE GIFT and leans into her powers instead of running from them again makes her a formidable protagonist, but it also makes her frustratingly flawed. She jumps headfirst into situations that she knows are dire, but makes poor judgement calls on how much she could handle herself. This lack of understanding over how much her actions affect her and those around her seems to be a pattern with the other characters, too. Olivia’s father and fiancè feel entitled to make decisions on her behalf in the name of saving the world, and, while both eventually apologize, these complex relationship dynamics come to a head—set up to be addressed in Book Three.
Evette Davis’s THE GIFT: Book Two in The Council Trilogy is a fun and pacy fantasy that enchants readers with its accessible prose, passionate romantic elements, and edge-of-your-seat action.
~K. Nesa for IndieReader