New Book Review for 1.11.24: Charmed Book of Shadows

Title: Charmed Book of Shadows 

Author: Ruby Raine 

Date: 2023 

Publisher: Rachel Daigle 

Quote: "A Gift to all my Fellow Fans of Charmed...Blessed Be." 

Fair disclosure: I never watched the TV series "Charmed." I think I read one of the tie-in paperback novels because it was written by one of the authors of the "Clueless" tie-ins, found the "Charmed" novel wasn't funny, and didn't read or remember far enough to get into the story. After twenty years, I'm not even certain whether it was "Charmed," or whether it was Randi Reisfeld or H.B. Gilmour. 

 However, the writer known as Ruby Raine has put together a 500-page fan memoir, in calligraphy, as a free gift to those who read her "witchy" romances, to share the memories of the series with fellow fans and to give new readers an idea of what's going on in her fantasy novels. It's an impressive work of fan art. I still have the official Visual Guide to Piers Anthony's Xanth and Anne McCaffrey's Pern. This is a similar book, but bigger. The words alone might be similar in size, but the words aren't all of this book. It's designed to be a real coffee-table collector's item. Each page is meant to look like either a carefully documented souvenir of a fantasy adventure, or an old letter stuck into the book, with different calligraphy styles (and computer fonts) to suggest different nationalities and generations of contributors to the family book. Some pages are in Latin, some in Italian, and some in a mad, possibly futuristic mix of words from different European languages. You'd want to print it as it is, and bind it in something that looks like leather, if you print it at all. 

For anyone who misses "Charmed" or who missed it and wonders what it was all about, this will be a treasure. 

Obligatory note: If you are the sort of reader who believes you should not buy or read books with which you don't agree, don't buy this book. "Charmed" had its own view of Good and Evil and the Origin of Life, a made-for-television conglomeration of as many different traditions as the producers were aware of. Nobody could possibly agree with it. I suspect the pathologically p.c. would call it cultural appropriation. Read it only if you're a real lower-case liberal, and proud.