review 1: This is going to be spoilerific up to the end of Shadows. Sorry.Right, so I am infuriated yet fascinated by this series. I love Stonewylde, I really like Berry's writing style and all the detail and the idea of a magickal community that is Not Twee At All. I also love that the writing and the editing has become much more polished and more readable as the series has gone.But. Oh My Gods. The characters.So, everyone who lives in Stonewylde is awful. First book, community is dominated by a terrible, controlling bully. Children are beaten to near death by their parents. Children are then horrible bullies to each other. Enter insipid characters from the outside world. Sylvie is initially plucky but then gets abused by Magus. Her mother Miranda totally fails to protect S... moreylvie because she falls in love with Magus and then abandons all personality of her own.I think the total unwillingness of parents to protect their offspring in the face of bullies is the thing that infuriates me the most about this series (followed swiftly afterwards by all the women being weak and passive with little agency).We have Clip, Sylvie's father, who raped her mother. This revelation is totally glossed over - Sylvie wakes up from unconsciousness or something to find that Miranda is totes okay with this now despite being massively traumatised by it since she became pregnant. What the hell? By book 4, Clip is the closest thing we have to a good guy, despite being a rapist and having been quite happy to hypnotise and abuse Sylvie. Yul and Sylvie eventually defeat Magus at the end of the third book (in which largely nothing else happens, it's just a big build-up to a confrontation), Yul spends the fourth book un-subtley turning into Magus and yelling at everyone. I get the everything is circular thing that Berry is trying to do here. I do. And it's clever, if a bit overstated.But, Gods, is it depressing. Would it have been so bad to have some of the 13-years-in-which-Yul-and-Sylvie-have-a-blissfully-happy-marriage given some screen time? The doom in this book reaches George RR Martin levels of unrelenting torment for one's characters.Because what I don't get, what I fundamentally don't get about Stonewylde (other than why no-one ever turns out to be gay, but that's a whole different rant) is why no-one ever leaves, runs away, or tries to kill themselves (before Leveret, natch). Yes, it's a magickal, fabulous place to live, but if what the protagonists encounter is representative of the community, all the inhabitants are horribly flawed and everyone is despairingly awful to each other all the time. Is this meant to be clever commentary on what it's like living in a cult? Maybe. I'd have loved to see a character who thought 'sod this' and just left, though.I'll buy the next book, because I'm an optimist and I'm hoping Leveret (AKA The First Female Character With A Hint of Backbone) will go all Dark Goddess and get some smiting done, and hopefully, some bring about some revolution. But I am worried, Kit Berry! Please make it cool! review 2: When we last saw Yul, he and Sylvie had defeated the dark forces in Stonewylde that threatened them, and could look forward to their life together. In Shadows of Stonewylde we fast-forward thirteen years. Yul and Sylvie have been to university, married and started a family together and are now running Stonewylde under the watchful eye of Sylvie's father Chip.But the dark forces they have banished are fighting to return, and mutinous elements within the Stonewylde have joined forces to crush Yul and his leadership and return the community to the old ways. The magic has gone and Yul and Sylvie's relationship is falling apart, but it's Yul's youngest sister Leveret who is suffering the most. And that's unfortunate because it seems she is the only person with a clear sense of what's going wrong.With the magic fading, love under threat and the Outside world creeping ever more into Stonewylde there are bound to be some readers who are disappointed with this latest chapter in the Stonewylde chapter. But there is no denying that it is powerfully written, with strong dramatic storylines and a cast of younger characters taking on the main roles. At the end of the book we are left with a cliffhanger again, with the dark forces arrayed on one side and only tiny, battered Leveret on the other. There are bound to be many more readers impatiently waiting for the fifth book in the series, to find out what happens next. less
