Bound by Kirsten Weiss is the first book in the Doyle Witch Cozy Mystery
Series.
I’d been postponing reading this book for a while because I wanted
to pick it up when I was free so I could get immersed in it. Then… I picked it
up on a whim and couldn’t put it down!
I was literally skipping on sleep because I was enjoying Bound.
Bound has all the elements of an amazing book: Magic, mystery, action,
adventure, humor and a great story!
“Why
are well still single?”
“Because
[Jayce wants] to date everyone, Lenore wants to date no one, and the man I want
to date doesn’t exist.”
Bound is
narrated in the first-person perspective of Karin, the middle sister of “triplets, three Scorpios born exactly three minutes
apart.”
“Jayce,
the oldest and the wild child, had never been able to resist a good sin. Lenore,
the youngest, was a bookish introvert. I was the middle child, a worrier by age
five who imagined disaster whenever Jayce played in the forest alone, who spent
sleepless nights in feat of losing my aunt as we’d lost our parents.”
Each of the three sisters
has a talent. And though Karin is the middle sister, she doesn’t seem to be the
strongest.
I wanted to know more about each
sister’s ability. Though Karin, as the narrator, explains what each of them can
do, we don’t see those abilities in action much.
One of things I liked about Bound is the presence of two mysteries. Come to think of it – several mysteries. Jayce is accused of murder and at the same time, a curse seems to plague the sisters and their bloodline. There are also the mysteries of the disappearing hikers and the women appearing out of nowhere.
How many of these mysteries might be connected?
“The sense of wrongness intensified. There was magic here, a magic I’d never felt in these woods before.”
A large part of Bound focuses on their aunt Ellen, who is dying from cancer. This pained me personally because someone really close to me was recently diagnosed.
Before Ellen passes, she tells the three sisters about the family curse and how she’d been trying to break it.
Another thing I liked about Bound was the references to other books, movies, and series. When Ellen talks to Karin about her “knot magic,” it reminded me of Diana Bishop in A Discovery of Witches. I watched the series but it was quite similar.
In one of the scenes, we see Lenore reading “a novel about a paranormal museum” to Ellen. It references Weiss’ Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum series, of which I’d read two books.
While reading Bound, I came across a reference to ‘the rose rabbit.’ Though Bound ends with no explanation of what the rose rabbit is, I remembered reading a poetry collection by Kirsten Weiss titled Tales of the Rose Rabbit. At the time, I hadn’t read any books in this series.
I think it’s time to revisit that poetry collection.
I was surprised to learn that the second book Ground
is narrated from Jayce’s perspective. Honestly, I didn’t like her. But I hope
to see a better side to her in Ground.
Overall, I fell in love with Bound and can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the series, which I recently discovered has transformed from a trilogy to a 9-book series! That’s excluding supplements and in-between books and crossover books!
Overall rating
for Bound by Kirsten Weiss: 5 stars!
Warning: If
you start, you won’t leave the book until it’s finished!
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