Diana wakes up to hear Matthew and her aunts talking about her and her amazing abilities, specifically, calling witchfire.  (Which seems to consist of very little fire, since she thought she was holing a…phantom bow, or something.)

“She told me that the goddess is present when witchfire is called.

It’s like this book just can’t help making the world building even murkier.  Is this the Wiccan goddess?  Is it goddess-Diana?  Is there an actual deity that hands out magic powers, or do all fantasy-witches in this world just happen to practice the same religion?

Or did this author just learn the bare basics of Wicca and decide that was enough to make a complete, bumbling mess of everything?  Because every time it comes up, it really does feel like she just said “Oh, that religion sounds like fantasy!  I think I’ll completely ignore that it’s a fucking religion that real people practice and just treat it like a fairy tale!  Fun times!”

I’m sure in her next book, Catholic priests will do magic-miracles on a whim and Hindus will hold séances with cows, or something.  Not like it could get any more ridiculous.

Diana might have inherited his abilities—and Rebecca’s, too, God help her. But she doesn’t have their knowledge, and without it she’s helpless.

Because our Mary Sue has to be special, but she’s a woman, so she also has to be helpless so that the big strong man can run in to save her and be all…manly.

Diana overhears them say that she’s spellbound, so she freaks out and yells at them and runs outside.  Apparently witches only spellbind people who are in danger of going insane/evil for magical reasons, so she’s got cause to be upset by hearing this.

Matthew follows her, and Diana tells him about how her mother turned the whole spellbinding thing into a bedtime story, thereby sort-of telling kid-Diana about what was going on.  Wouldn’t it have been nice to get some sort of hint of this whole storyline before now?  It’s a major concept being introduced to us ¾ths of the way through the book.  This whole thing is such a mess of unconnected ideas and plot lines that never make any sort of cohesive whole.

Remember that magic book?  The one we opened on?  Has it amounted to anything yet?  No, of course not, because the author got bored and decided to throw in a barrel of monkeys instead.  This is like a NaNo novel on crack that never got edited.

Matthew, after a whole book of deciding that she doesn’t need to use her witchy powers because he’ll protect her, now decides that she needs to use her witchy powers.  Diana resists, so he figures the best way to fix this is to…attack her until she fights back.

That’s right, our romantic lead is using the exact same tactic as the cackling cartoon villain.  

Granted, he’s a lot less cut-y and pain-y, but he’s still trying to scare and threaten her into using magic.  If that didn’t work when Satu was flaying her open, why does he think it’ll work now?  And why, after that horrific torture, does he think it’ll do anything except send her into a tailspin?  Oh, right, because Diana doesn’t have shit for consequences after being kidnapped and tortured and left in a hole. 

Except this time it works, because fuck making sense.  She spontaneously learns how to fly and see with some ‘Third Eye’ that basically works like regular sight, but with Sparkle Vision, or something.

I hung my head, frightened by the creature I was becoming.

Diana is finally getting a handle on her powers, finally starts learning to control them on purpose and use them to effect her own desires and wishes, finally starts to have some actual power…and that frightens her.

If I could get rid of just one misogynistic trope from our culture, if some genie came down and said “I’ll magic away just one,” I would pick this one.  This toxic, pervasive belief that for some reason power in the hands of a woman is something dangerous, something that needs to be controlled, because at any moment it might…I don’t know, make her mad-corrupt with power or something.  Like women are just too delicate and weak to handle it and it might mentally break them.  It’s an idea that not only keeps women out of powerful positions, but also keeps them from even trying.  It keeps them dependent on men, which means that they’ll be less likely to fight back against abusive men and less likely to tackle the difficult task of social change.

I hate it.  I hate it, hate it, hate it, and it needs to die.

And this book might, at first, seem to be subverting that by having Diana still learn her powers anyway, but she’s learning them in such a…thoughtless way.  That’s literally the key to her powers: don’t think and don’t try.  Just let stuff happen without you telling it to.  That not Diana using her power, that’s her power using her, and scaring her on top of all the rest.

So then they go home and far too many words are wasted on arguing with the aunts, eating dinner, and going to bed.  Bleh.