Mark of the Witch approaches a new set of themes and ideas. Unlike other subjects, the ones promoted by Maggie Shayne weren’t covered very often in the fantasy literature. This is one of the reasons why I was curious to read this book. The novel displays the story of Indira, a former Wiccan witch. Because of some disappointing angles, a few years ago she stopped believing in magic and in the Wiccan religion basis. The book starts with a nightmare that haunts our heroine for a while and that starts being really scary. Indira finds physical evidences of the dream and the only person that can help her is an old friend, a Wiccan priestess. And because of her friend, Indira meets Tomas, a Gnostic priest, who tells her an incredible story about reincarnation, past lives, Babylon, witchcraft, demons and the end of the world. And unfortunately, the fantastic episodes that keep happening to Indira confirm what the priest tells her. The relation between Indi and Tomas starts exceeding some innocent limits and both characters have a close friend to support them, even if the directions the’re dragging them in are totaly different. The mysteries are thickening, scary memories from past lives keep coming back, the disbelief is raising and weird things start to happen more frequently. And Indira’s truth is more and more different of Tomas’s, but it’s impossible to discover which is in fact, the only truth. And a tiny mistake could mean the end of the world.Despite the fact that the storyline is well built, the characters are described in a perfect manner and you can’t say that the story is missing something, I just wasn’t fascinated by the novel. In the first half of the book, the story has a slow rhythm and even if I knew the importance of any tiny mistake, I just didn’t feel the tension as I should have. You simply know all the time that you are reading a story, you’re not carried away in the world described by the author, you don’t feel the emotions, the tension and the suspense. I liked the way the characters were created (even the negative ones). Indira accepts pretty hard what she finds out, despite the signs left by her dreams and other proof that show that what happens is real. I liked the fact that she is not throwing herself in the information avalanche, but she tries to slowly understand what’s happening and sometimes, she almost refuses to believe what she finds out. Her friend is perfectly mixing the discretion with the tendency to encourage her to believe again in magic and in herself, but she is not pushy or obtrusive. The interior fight of Tomas is also well written. He’s divided between the theories he believed in all his life and a new fact that contradicts everything he knows. And Tomas mentor is the perfect example of the ideologue character, which refuses any other version of the story he knows, no matter how well that version is built or how elusive his arguments are.Pros:- I liked the idea of reincarnation, the conspiracy theory carried through thousands of years and the way every character strongly believes in his aims. At the end, the novel becomes almost a thriller and the revelations are offering exactly the needed dose of drama and surprise.Cons:- The first part of the novel is a little too slow, the action is prolonged and the weird dreams and the paranormal experiences of the heroine are not able to balance the story.
