1990s Nostalgia: The Secret Circle by L.J. Smith

A few years ago, the novels of L.J. Smith made a bit of a comeback thanks her series The Vampire Diaries being made into a popular television series. I can recall these books being around when I was a kid, sharing the same shelves and dark, trashy covers as books by horror YA novelists like R.L. Stine, Diane Hoh and Christopher Pike. A huge part of the appeal was always the cheap, trashy, and melodramatic feel that can probably be summed up by this cover:





Equally popular as the Vampire Diaries back in the early 1990s was the pictured L.J. Smith series The Secret Circle I was a little surprised to discover that this one has also been made into a television series recently and this intrigued me. I remembered very little about the dramatic adventures of a young woman who discovers that her destiny is to be a part of a coven of witches and decided to reread the first book just for fun. Book one, The Initiation follows the dramatic adventures a girl named Cassie who discovers her destiny is to be a part of a coven of witches. Some of the witches are nice, some are not so nice and Cassie should definitely not be falling for Adam the boyfriend of Diana, the witch who is kindest to her ...

As is often the case when I return to reading some of my favourite pulpy childhood reads, The Initiation was a bit of a let down. Although it was intelligently written and had a number of interesting turns, I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief on a number of occasions. Of course, at the time, the melodrama was a bit part of the appeal, as was the fact that every adult in the novel seemed not only distant, but completely incompetent (always a big plus when I was a kid).

There are a number of questions that remained unanswered at the end of the book, however these were probably addressed in the sequels, The Captive and The Power. I was also amused to discover when I researched this post that in 2012, twenty years after the release of The Power and to coincide with the new television series a number of books penned written by ghostwriters were added to the series. (Apparently, L.J. Smith was fired from her publisher after a dispute regarding a plot twist. Read more here.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more