When Charmed the TV series debuted in 1999, I didn't really watch it because I was more into Buffy.
Around 2002, I began watching it because well...not a lot of TV up where I was going to college but they had The WB for entertainment. It was in the Paige era of The Charmed Ones but thanks to TNT, I caught up on reruns before buying the whole series on DVD.
I bought 3 tie-in novels of Charmed and only one was with Prue. I never really got around to buying any more of them but as Fate would have it...I stumbled on a lucky or unlucky situation depending on how you look at it.
Not long after Shannen Doherty passed away from breast cancer, I happened to be out with my husband and daughter at a pass at the Half Price Books. I stumbled on a box of books that had yet to be put on the shelves due to lack of room: all of them Charmed tie-in novels.
Most were duplicates but I walked away with eight of them so here I am...filling up the rest of October with seven of my new ones and re-reading the three I already had.
In Remembrance of Shannen Doherty for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
So The Power of Three is a novelization of the original pilot because the proper first episode "Something Wicca This Way Comes" is just a little different.
For anyone who has never watched the show a quick rundown:
Prue Halliwell and her sister Piper have moved out of the apartment they shared and back into the home of their recently departed grandmother they affectionately called Grams. Grams raised the girls and their youngest sister Phoebe after their mother died and their father was nowhere around until she had a heart attack and died from complications.
The sisters, mainly Prue and Phoebe, fought over matters of selling the home and personal issues involving Prue's fiance, Roger. Phoebe moved away to New York to try and live on her own and track down their dad, a person Prue has never wished to see again since she had to take care of her sisters as the oldest.
Grams left the house to all three girls in her will so the oldest two have moved in to make repairs and Prue is no longer with Roger but he is her boss at her job. Piper is looking to get a job as a chef at the new restaurant Quake in their hometown of San Francisco and is dating a reporter named Jeremy.
Phoebe moves back at what can only be seen as the wrong time and not just because Prue is still cross with her...
In the city, someone is going around a murdering women. The women all have one thing in common and that is a tattoo that indicates them as witches, practitioners of Wiccan magic.
That night when a powerful storm knocks out the power, Phoebe makes her way up to the attic while Prue and Piper check the basement. The door had been locked but it opens and Phoebe finds herself drawn to a trunk which she opens to find a book but not just any book.
It is a Book of Shadows, a book of spells for witches to use. Phoebe finds that it has belonged to ancestors of their family descended from Melinda Warren, the first witch of their line. On the day she was burned at the stake, she proclaimed that daughters would be born of her line and that the day would come that three sisters would inherit each of her powers.
The power to move objects with the mind, to freeze time and to see the future that would make them the most powerful witches of all...The Charmed Ones.
A quick read of an incantation and boom...Phoebe has just awakened their family powers!
The ghost of Melinda Warren, not all pretty but burned and disfigured, appears to Phoebe to warn her that now evil will becoming after the sisters to steal their Book of Shadows and their powers.
Yet the only way to take a witch's power...is to take her life.
Demons and warlocks, or evil witches, will be after them now and Phoebe can not get either one of her sisters to believe her. It also doesn't help that Prue's high school boyfriend, Andy Trudeau, is an inspector with the SFPD on the case of the murdered women. He has known all three girls since childhood and his detective skills are methodical so Andy can tell when Prue seems...different from the girl he has always known and Phoebe is more on edge than ever.
The girls learn of their new powers and get use to them one after the other but soon, all three of them will have to band together to fight an evil that will only be just the beginning...