Blue is for Nightmares by Laurie Faria Stolarz. Llewellyn Worldwide: Woodbury, MN. 2003.

White is for Magic by Laurie Faria Stolarz. Llewellyn Worldwide: Woodbury, MN. 2004.

Silver is for Secrets by Laurie Faria Stolarz. Llewellyn Worldwide: Woodbury, MN. 2005.

Red is for Rembrance by Laurie Faria Stolarz. Llewellyn Worldwide: Woodbury, MN. 2005.

Along with these comes a small leaflet type spell book which contains a dozen of the spells found in the 4 books.

This might be a long one.

Here are 4 books chronicling the life and times of Stacey, a young self proclaimed Wiccan. We meet Stacey while she is at prep school and begins having nightmares about her room mate and best friend. We soon learn that Stacey has had nightmares before, and unfortunately they ended up coming true. Stacey knows her nightmares are premonitions, and throughout each book, Stacey’s nightmares start up again warning her about impending doom.

I have very mixed feelings about these books. For starters, I understand these are supposed to be books for teens, so I really wish they had been written for teens. My 15 year old daughter asked me if she could read them when I was done, and after reading these books, I had to tell her no.

In the first book Blue is for Nightmares the characters are all around the age of 16, and by Red is for Rembrance they are freshman in college. Should be just about perfect for my daughter, but one of the characters in here, Amber – well I don’t know why she is even in the books to begin with. She’s a nasty person who never has anything nice to say, she teases people and bullies them all the time, and yet were supposed to believe that not only do people like her, but the main character portrayed as the “good little witch” would be friends with someone of this caliber. And not to mention the boy who is madly in love with her that she blows off rudely and constantly for almost 3 and half books, yet he still pines away for her. Moron. She’s more than boy crazy, she’s down right over sexed. References to her dating a security guard at the prep school they attend are ludicrous since she is of course an underage minor at the time.

In Silver is for Secrets we get to encounter another oversexed psycho child, this one 15 who is often found trying to get into the beds of college students – again, the question of jail bait comes to mind.

I didn’t feel very comfortable reading some parts of these books and some of the behaviors in here. I sure would not my daughter, nor anyone else’s for that matter, thinking the author was telling them that it’s ok to act like a tramp. These stories could very easily have been written without the trash, yet for some reason they weren’t.

My other problem with this book is the complete total lack of spirituality. This girl not only claims she is a Wiccan, she gets totally irrate at a girl who dresses goth for being a “wannabe”. She lets this girl know in no uncertain terms, that being Wiccan is far more than just casting spells. Yet all we see Stacey doing is casting spells constantly. There are some references to energy, maybe one or two to spirituality throughout all 4 books, yet the God? the Goddess? Don’t recall meeting them in these books at all. Stacey shows the world around her that being Wiccan is all about interpreting dreams, having premonitions, and of course casting spells. But that’s it. I found it very ironic for her character to be chastising another for the exact same thing we see Stacey do all the time. Not too mention, Stacey has her non-wiccan, non-pagan, and some of the time non-believing at all friends help her do spells.

By the time I was done reading all 4 of these books, and yes I read them one right after the other, I was left with the feeling that here we have tried to take Hermione Grainger out of Hogwarts and attempted to drop her off in middle America. Only Hermione is still a much more likeable character than any of the characters in these books.

I really like the idea of having stories for kids and teens about what real pagan life is about. But I felt this series just went too far with the trash factor and crammed in far more spell working than what I would imagine most people do on a daily basis. I mean Stacey, she lives her life to do spells, seems she can’t go a day without them. These stories had a lot of potential. We could have heard at least a little about her personal connection with deities instead of a spell everyday. We really didn’t need Amber, at all, especially since she doesn’t add anything to the story line. We could have seen how one girl stands up for her beliefs yet part of the time we find her trying to hide who she is. I feel the reader is being let down.

If you want to check these books out, please, do go right ahead, but also if you want to give them to your kids, how about you read them first, just so you know what it is being said to them.

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Created Dec 27, 2009 at 10:31am • Submit your own review...