Spellcaster by Cara Lynn Shultz***

Goodreads Blurb

Finding your eternal soulmate - easy.
Stopping a true-love-hungry evil - not so much…
After breaking a centuries-old romantic curse, Emma Connor is (almost) glad to get back to normal problems. Although...it's not easy dealing with the jealous cliques and gossip that rule her exclusive Upper East Side prep, even for a sixteen-year-old newbie witch. Having the most-wanted boy in school as her eternal soul mate sure helps ease the pain-especially since wealthy, rocker-hot Brendan Salinger is very good at staying irresistibly close....

But something dark and hungry is using Emma and Brendan's deepest fears to reveal damaging secrets and destroy their trust in each other. And Emma's crash course in über-spells may not be enough to keep them safe…or to stop an inhuman force bent on making their unsuspected power its own.

This is book two of the Spellbound series and no, I have not posted the review forSpellbound yet. But I decided to post a review on Spellcaster simply because I feel as if book #2 is better the #1. I received this through NetGalley (amazing site!) and was so excited! I’m still not used to receiving eARCs or ARCs in general.  I can’t believe my blog is already 6-7 months old!

Away from nostalgia, Spellcaster made me realize why I loved Cara Lynn’s writing so much. Not only did she create a whole bunch of legends and “spells” that caught my interest. You never really read a lot of stories about witches, you know? I mean, paranormal worlds have been taken over by the one we all know and love/hate: vampires. So reading a book with witches is different because they have advantages that vamps don’t have, and disadvantages that vamps don’t have. It wasn’t disorienting, but you could notice the change in…creature? For me, witches just seem more fun, more human, because really, they are humans. Just with a few gifts. And witches are something you can twist into a “good” or “evil” whereareas vampires, for some reason, always stay “evil”.

I loved the new conflict even better than the old one, where instead of just realizing that she was a witch who had found her soulmate, she had to fight for her soul mate. She had to get used to her powers. She had to learn how to control her gifts. And she had to trick a (quite literally) bloodthirsty witch who was hell-bent on making Emma pay. And all this a new witch has to deal with! Pretty intense. But Emma deals with it, still making time to care for her cousin, to still hide her secret, and deal with Kristin. So maybe emma’s not as kickass as some other characters, but Emma is strong, in her own way. And I think that the way she deals with things is better than how she reacts with things. Emma is definitely badass in her own way.

Reading Spellcaster  takes you to another one of Emma’s past lives, and I think I’m starting to see a pattern here even with only reading two books in the series: (a)We readers will see a short clip of Emma’s past lives through her dreams. (b) There will always be a story in Hadrian’s Medieval Legends that replays in the “present” and (c) Brendan and Emma will always be one of the cutest couples ever. So far, in both books all three have been proven true! Spellcaster was an amazing read that reminded why I first started reading. The thrilling good versus evil fights, the soul mates, the witches, all cliché, but all new in Spellcaster! They say sequels are a disappointment, but are they really? Well, maybe some, but Spellcaster? Not. At. All. If you say differently, please, I do not want to hear it. You can try, but I doubt you’ll convince me.

Pages: 384

Series: Spellbound #2

Genre: Fantasy/Romance

Rating: 5 stars

"There was just me and her on this roof. And she wasn't going to stop. And if she got her powers back, revenge would be the first order of business. She would kill Brendan. She would take him away from me, away from this world."