The Water Witch is the second novel in a trilogy by Carol Goodman, using the pseudonym Juliet Dark, and though it's filled with callbacks to the events of The Demon Lover, the wider scope of the overall story requires a previous reading. As the sequel begins, Callie McFay barely has time to recover from the emotional trauma of banishing her incubus lover from the mortal plane when she is thrust into an intrigue that centers around Fairwick, the upstate New York community that holds the last gate to the land of Faerie. Callie has already joined the faculty of the local college, which is filled with witches, fairies and other uncanny creatures; now, she is called to side with her friends against her own grandmother, a bigoted witch who seeks to shut down the connection between the two worlds. Oh, and you didn't think the incubus was really gone, did you?
If the narrative arc of an orphaned female academic discovering her magical gifts in the midst of a turbulent affair with a supernatural antihero seems reminiscent of Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night, Callie's role as the gatekeeper between our world and Faerie also has strong echoes of Black Swan Rising and its sequels, which Goodman co-authors with her husband as Lee Carroll. Much of the plot is driven by Callie's naïveté, which borders on an emotional unintelligence implausible in a woman her age. Luckily, her shortcomings are effectively counterweighted by the entertaining details of her richly imagined surroundings, which we'll see at least once more, in the forthcoming The Hallowed Door. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com