Rounded up to three stars.
Either one person or a lot of people brought their Charmed tie-in novels to one of the two Half Price Book stores I frequent. Some I already had but I bought all of the others just to see how good they are.
There were only ten books covering the first three seasons of Charmed with Prue, Piper and Phoebe.
All of the rest focused on the last five seasons of Piper, Phoebe and Paige.
None of them are canon but do have elements from the show. Mentions of the club would put this as at least Season 2 since it is when Piper opened P3.
Out on a trip to buy shoes, a warlock starts attacking the Halliwell sisters in an alley. Piper's freezing power is a little off so they believe the warlock is very powerful and Phoebe can't have him running around San Francisco after innocents.
While Prue tends to Piper, Phoebe follows the warlock but then discovers that he is a demon as she grabs on to his slimy, scaly green tail. It opens up a portal and Phoebe is sucked into a vortex of green smoke.
When Prue and Piper reach the dead end of a high to climb wall, they find the clothes that Phoebe was wearing along with a pile of soot and oil covered material that was the demon's "human" disguise. A spell from the Book of Shadows meant to track Phoebe is indecisive or worst-case scenario...dead.
Phoebe is very much alive but has been sent back to the past by the demon...a time demon. She finds herself completely naked in a Puritan village, but it is her pierced belly button and crimson manicured nails that draw the attention of the townspeople more. They accuse her of being a witch, but Phoebe is saved by a handsome man named Hugh Montgomery, who shields her with his cloak and claims her to be his visiting "sister".
Phoebe feigns having no memory of what happened and says she was attacked by robbers and stripped of her clothing. Hugh takes her to stay with the Widow Wentworth who has been providing Hugh with a place to stay in payment of hiring him for her late husband's farm. Phoebe learns that she is in Salem circa 1676 but wonders exactly...why now and this place?
Almost knocking over a clay pot, Phoebe finds a gold crescent charm inside of it and one touch brings about a vision that Phoebe knows about all too well: a woman being burned at the stake with blonde hair and blue eyes.
It is Melinda Warren, the first witch of the Charmed Ones line and first writer in the Book of Shadows. A young woman in her early twenties and a child no more than five arrive with the same blonde hair and blue eyes as Melinda. The young widow introduces herself as Prudence and her daughter is Cassandra and in a sly bit of chit-chat, Phoebe learns the gold charm once belonged to Prudence's mother.
This is one of the Halliwell ancestors.
Prudence seems to be nice but the following morning, she gives Phoebe grief for sleeping in so late and Phoebe also notices that Hugh is a big flirt to both women. Going to fetch water, Phoebe comes across the demon, and he sets fire to Prudence's barn.
She believes it was Phoebe who started it, and Prudence doesn't take kindly to Hugh taking Phoebe's side more than hers. Later when Phoebe catches Prudence writing in the Book of Shadows, she finds the spell she was writing is a pretty evil one and Prudence even threatens to kill Phoebe the next time she even thinks of touching it.
Phoebe knows that the book never had spells to do harm or evil to innocents so why are they now?
In the present, Piper and Prue are trying to find Phoebe but soon their grief and guilt turn into squabbles where they can't stand each other. Prue notices the spells are changing in the book and when they tell how to get rid of warlocks and take their powers, both sisters are now on a high to tracking demons and wearing black clothes. The bigger problem is...they have no interest in saving their sister?
They are turning evil, and it all has to do with the whispers from the past...
The who, how and why all the good witches are going bad is the reveals made as the book goes along but how Prue and Piper turn back to normal and save Phoebe from the past without completely re-writing the future are the next big questions.
There is some sentimentality to the story and some sisterly bickering and snarking towards the end but having already watched Charmed, canon episodes from the show handled the same plots and themes much better.
One book down...twenty-one more to go.
Yep, you read that right, so it looks like I'm in for A Very Charmed Summer.