Kathleen O'Brien

This thing's a stinker. Which is a pity because the Mayfair Witches trilogy was IMPO, Rice's best work. It's been butchered beyond repair. Stick a fork in it now. If you want to write a series about witches, write your own instead of slicing and dicing someone else's work into something that resembles fevered remembrances of a 20-year old high-priestess wanna-be from the nearest pagan fest. Then we're assaulted with post-show explications of what this tangled mess is meant to be. Hint: show don't tell - that's the first rule. If you have to explain it all over again - you didn't show it. Okay, maybe, in fairness, they did write their own story - which is just really bad fan fiction. But keeping Rice's name - thus cachet on it - is cheap and lazy. The casting is terrible, the writing is worse, and the license that's been taken is criminal. Warning: spoilers follow. Rowan is not a "magical being" - she's a genetically engineered being - Lasher did that by manipulating the mating habits of his witches. The writers completely left out Rowan's research work and why she's well qualified to figure out what Lasher is up to. They failed to show. And this "Rowan's a magical being" nonsense is pure pagan fest-itis. Then of course we are feted to scenes that look like the ugly love children that sprung up when a pagan fest and a RennFaire collided and then went awry, overlaid with scripting that parrots the trappings of post-modern feminist witchcraft theory. Said scenes are supposed to flash up back to the origins of the witch line - but we don't get that. Just the usual drumming around a fire and cheesy costuming - pagan fest. To legitimize all that nonsense we then are jerked forward to Deirdre's funeral where Rowan gets the schmooze about "Ohhhh the Mayfair women are soo unique passing down all their stuff to their daughters." No - they aren't. Women generally have passed their stuff down to their daughters - including their mitochondrial DNA. But read a few wills from centuries past and you'll see that women have always passed down valuable property to daughters. And then there's the casting, direction, and dialogue. The dialogue is childish. They had the best dialogue - it was already in the books. All they had to do was put in the actors' mouths. But - nooooo. Rowan is supposed to be tall blonde, deep/husky voiced, assertive, and self-assured. They cast a tiny little mouse who plays Rowan as an anxious nailbiter, I assume because of the direction she as given. Think about it - would you want a shrinking violet like that cutting into *your* brain? No, you would not. They eliminated the character of Michael who is essential, eliminated Aaron, as well as completely restructured the Talamasca. They tried to write Courtland Mayfair into a facsimile of Julien - which he wasn't - Courtland was weak compared to Julien - the only male witch in the line. And they completely ignored the entirety of Scottish indigenous folk myth which Rice researched meticulously when creating Lasher. This Lasher we're given is just the skeevy guy you can find in any bar hitting on women too young for him and out of his league. I hope Rice comes out of her grave and haunts them all for this .