The Queen's Curse
Reviewed by Tim McCree
August 2005

BOOK: The Queen's Curse
AUTHOR:  Emma Harrison
NOTE: This review may contain plot spoilers.

For many a young woman, meeting the perfect Prince Charming would be a dream. For Paige Matthews, it happens, literally!

In this book, Paige meets a handsome young man named Colin and sparks fly. The two of them are soon virtually inseparable. At first, Paige worries that Colin may be a Warlock or a Demon, so she brings him to the Manor to meet the family and make sure he’s not evil. When Phoebe doesn’t sense anything sinister and Wyatt doesn’t raise his force field, it seems Colin is in the clear, so Paige is happy. Soon, Colin even asks her to marry him, and Paige is floored at such a proposal so soon into their relationship. However, it’s at this point that Colin’s fiancé, Corrinne, shows up!

It turns out that Colin is more than just an average cute guy, rather, he is the Prince of Tarsina, a magical kingdom that exists on an alternate plane of existence (apparently the same spatial location that Switzerland occupies in our world). For centuries, Tarsina was isolated from Earth, but in the last hundred years or so, outsiders, namely non-magical humans, had been invited to live there, by the kingdom’s inhabitants. Many of the kingdom’s inhabitants were curious about the mortal world and headed out to explore it. In the course of those explorations, they met, and brought many normal humans back to Tarsina to live (the normal humans were wives, husbands, lovers, etc, of the explorers). However, many traditionalists, or Loyalists as they called themselves, didn’t like that. They felt that contact with normal humans was destroying their way of life. Among their ranks at the time was Colin’s great-grandmother, who put a curse on the Royal Family. Said curse was that if the Prince did not marry a magical being by his twenty-fifth birthday, all non-magical beings in Tarsina would die. Although she is dead now, the Loyalist movement continues, and they fully support the curse. Although he deeply loves Corrinne, Colin knows she is not magical, hence the problem. His wedding day is fast approaching and the threat of the curse looms over him. So that is why he asked Paige to marry him, since she’s magical, the kingdom will be spared the effects of the curse. How can Paige marry a man who really does not love her, but loves someone else? Yet if she doesn’t marry Colin, thousands of innocents will die. How can the Charmed Ones save the day this time?

I found the plot of this book very interesting in that it tackles the issue of bigotry and intolerance, an issue that plagues the real, non-magical world. The Loyalists are almost Nazi like in their ideals. They want the old ways to continue and do not care if thousands of innocent people have to die for that to happen. It seems that to them the ends justify the means. Decades ago, this kind of thinking ran amok in Germany with horrifying results, and now it seems that the Charmed Ones are now pitted against people with a similar agenda. Like the Allies in Germany of 1945, the Charmed Ones, some sixty years later, have to make sure that Tarsina is finally free of these ideals, once and for all.

Once again the Charmed Ones in a book outshine their television counterparts. Try as I might, I cannot imagine the shallow creatures they have become on the show of being the heroes this story calls for. It makes think how far the show has sunk that the only good professional Charmed stories can now only be found in the books (Fan Fictions notwithstanding, when I say professional, I mean writers who are paid to write Charmed stories, fans do it for free, of course).

Some other points:

-Wyatt is included in this book, but there is still no sign of Chris.

-Daryl does not appear in this story, however, since most of the action takes place in Tarsina, rather than San Francisco, I would not expect him to be included.

-This is another aspect of the books that I enjoy, the fact that the Charmed Ones go on the road to fight evil in other countries and realms. The show would seem to indicate that all the Warlocks and Demons are in San Francisco and nowhere else!

All in all, this book was an enjoyable read. I give it an 8/10.

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