The Gifts That Bind Us (All Our Hidden Gifts #2)

˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗ (3 stars)

Not my favorite book, but it has some high points and I enjoyed the read. I enjoyed reading a book with a tarot-inspired storyline and I enjoyed seeing the second book pick up where the first one left off.

but first, the summary

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Alarm bells sound for the coven when the Children of Brigid, a right-wing religious organization, quickly gains influence throughout the city—and when its charismatic front man starts visiting Maeve in her dreams. When Maeve’s power starts to wane, the friends realize that all the local magic is being drained—or rather, stolen. With lines increasingly blurred between friend and foe, the supernatural and the psychological, Maeve and the others must band together to protect the place, and the people, they love. A thrilling sequel to All Our Hidden Gifts.

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**some spoiler highlights**

📚 📚 📚 📚HIGHLIGHTS: 📚 📚 📚 📚

**THE WICCAN PREMISE – One of the reasons I originally picked up the first book in this series, All Our Hidden Gifts, was because I was really excited to read a book about someone that falls in love with tarot and thereby gets sucked into a world that includes Wicca. I’m personally really into tarot and this is not a theme often included in fantasy novels. Seeing something that is more contemporary with just a touch of fantasy is one of the things that makes O’Donoghue’s book special. There just aren’t a lot of novels out there where tarot is central to the story, and it was an integral reason for why I originally read the first book as well as why I chose to continue reading the series.

**IT’S SO SLOW – Just like the first book in this series, the plot moves soooo dang slow. There’s a lot of ‘going through the motions’ in this novel. Maeve goes to school. Maeve is at home. Maeve makes up some magic. Maeve goes to the store. Maeve has a random run in with the evil people that we don’t really understand and then continues with her daily life. It takes forever for the plot to progress forward. Because of this, I actually paused reading both the first book in the series as well as this sequel. I stopped reading it for weeks and then one day I picked it back up and started reading it again. It wasn’t poorly written. It was interesting. It was just slow and I often wished there was more action to keep me hooked. I hated feeling like I had to wait around for the plot to happen.

**THE ANTAGONISTS AND THEIR MOTIVATIONS ARE CONFUSING – We learned so much more about the Children of Brigid in this book, and yet, we still know absolutely nothing. We know they are a network of people aimed at collecting power and magic. They latch onto people like Maeve who are connected to wells of power to drain its power. And….then what? That’s literally all we get. The entire time while reading this book, I felt this odd limbo between seeing the Children of Brigid as legitimate antagonists to the story and just feeling like they are background characters. Perhaps this is due to the mostly contemporary tone of the novel, but I think seeing the Children of Brigid have higher stakes would have meant more to the threat they represented. The only time I felt any sort of ‘fear’ from the Children of Brigid was near the end of the novel when we learn the well is almost drained and they go to the school to try to bind the school counselor. Most of the time though…they are just “eh.” To some degree, I wish we could have seen more of the Handmaiden (in both books) become a larger antagonist character in the plot line. Her mystery and lack of adherence to the real world made her a much more compelling evil to the story.

**AARON IS KIND OF GOOD – I’ll admit it was entirely unexpected to find Aaron become humanized, and I appreciated the surprise…but Aaron was heavily villainized in the first novel. He was the only central point for our interpretation of the Children of Brigid and throughout the first book, he had represented the opposite of magic — the ugly side of religion, full of bigotry, hate, and non-acceptance. So, it was jarring to lose our one visual for the ‘enemy’ of the novel. It contributed to the haziness I felt toward the antagonist of the storyline, and it made him a scapegoat. We had gotten used to hating him and so it was an incredible turnoff to start having to spend time with him and understand him. Yet, I appreciated the theme of how hate breeds hate — those that utilized hatred against him made him what he was and made him an asset to the Children of Brigid — and at his core, he wasn’t hate and he wasn’t what the Children made him to be. There’s a lesson in the book, an obvious one of course, but the storyline amplified these themes. By dedicating so much more toward the character development of Aaron, we continue to lose sight of the antagonist of the storyline.

**MAEVE’S FRIENDS KIND OF SUCK – In the first book, Maeve is isolated and alone, but we understand that it’s due to a combination of being an outsider and her own actions against others. She was terrible to Lily and is, not purposely, the reason Lily has disappeared. Lily’s brother, Roe, because a shoulder to cry on and a love explored. Fiona, an eccentric classmate, becomes Maeve’s friend and explore how magic intertwines with Lily’s disappearance. By the end of the novel, Maeve has developed a circle of people that are outsiders like her, and have gone through so much together, forming a deeper bond. In the second book, that kind of all falls a part and I hate the dissolution of the dynamic greatly. Lily hates her (though that seems to heal a bit by the end), Roe starts gaslighting her (though apparently that’s kind of not his fault because of the magic?), and Fiona has every right to be pissed at Maeve. It’s a cluster, and Maeve encounters a lot of these issues either alone or with the help of either Aaron or the shop owner. I just felt Maeve’s isolation continue from the first book, right when it had seemed like things were going to get better, and I found it all a bit depressing.

**THE MAGIC IS HYPED UP JUST TO THEN…DISAPPEAR – When I finished the first novel, I was really excited to know that going into the rest of the series, we would start seeing some bigger magical moments. Maeve could read minds, Roe had telekinesis, Lily had electricity, and Fiona had healing powers. It was super cool! And it was fun to explore that in the beginning of the second novel. But then, it all just disappears. We’re given some explanation about the well being drained, but for me, the magic had been a sign that bigger more fantastical elements of the storyline would develop. Instead, it all just disappeared, which continued the slow underwhelming tone of the book. Magic gained, magic gone.

📚 📚 📚 📚CONCLUSION: 📚 📚 📚 📚
Not a bad book and not a bad series, but overall Caroline O’Donoghue’s book is slow, at times unclear, and sometimes overtly simple. I question some of the creative decisions. That said, this is not a bad book, nor was All Our Hidden Gifts. It still brings in tarot and magic as central storylines which I loved, embraced a simple contemporary tone which was refreshing, and is well written. It’s a solid 3-star book.

where to read it

The Gifts That Bind Us by Caroline O’Donoghue
Available on Amazon in Hardback, Paperback, eBook, & Audiobook