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Once a Witch tells the story of Tamsin Green, a member of very Talented witch family. At the time of her birth, Tamsin is predicted to be the most Talented of them all. Now that Tamsin is a teenager, it seems unusual that her abilities never developed, leaving her as the black sheep of the family. When a mysterious stranger shows up at her grandmother’s store asking for help retrieving a valuable heirloom, Tamsin agrees, hoping to prove her self-worth despite a lack of Talent. The same day, Aunt Lydia (a family friend, not really her aunt) and her son, Gabriel, return from California. Gabriel winds up joining Tasmin on her search, and along the way Tasmin gets reacquainted with the childhood friend she didn’t write to for years, realizing that he’s done a lot of growing up during their time apart. Together, Tasmin and Gabriel travel through time uncovering secrets of the Green family’s history and growing closer.

Carolyn MacCullough creates an exciting urban fantasy in Once a Witch. A complex story full of intrigue, romance, power, and conflict, this novel will utterly absorb the reader. I was impressed by the way Carolyn MacCullough cleverly plays with time, weaving an intricate web of clues and adventures for Tamsin and Gabriel. Not a single character in this story is there for padding – even the minor ones are important. Rather than being a classic novel of good-versus-evil, the Green’s shady history leads Tamsin, and with her the reader, to question otherwise accepted truths and individuals’ motivations. Above all, this is a story about discovering one’s identity and protected those you care for. Once a Witch is a thrilling race through time with an enchanting love story that leaves the reader desperate for a sequel. 8 out of 10.

P.S. Once a Witch has a really awesome website including quizzes, a family tree, and information about witches.

Want to get someone’s attention subconciously, want to get on someone’s nerves?  You need to annoy them, and here is how you can do it.

1) Crack your knuckles/toes.  Cracking your knuckles is easier and more common, but if you can crack your toes, that really gets their spine tingling.  Not only is it not common, it sounds louder and more painful.

2) Bite your nails.  Just the sound of that can drive some people insane.

3) Keep staring at a certain part of someone’s body.  For instance, pretend you see a giant zit on someone’s cheek and keep staring at it to the point where they need to move away.

4) Be sloppy.  Untuck your shirt halfway, have a milk mustache, and have long fingernails (if you’re a guy) all at the same time.

5) Last but not least, Talk!  Talk about anything and everything.  See an ant, talk about it.  It must be touch for ants, huh?  Is that a tree?  What a nice tree.  You’re nice; why are you so nice, it’s amazing!  You know what’s amazing?  Magicians.  It’s not real magic though.  It looks like it though, but it’s just tricks.  Like in the song, you know, sing with me. “It’s tricky! It’s tricky!”.  What you don’t like singing?  It’s good for the heart….and so on.

Want to get someone’s attention subconciously, want to get on someone’s nerves?  You need to annoy them, and here is how you can do it.

1) Crack your knuckles/toes.  Cracking your knuckles is easier and more common, but if you can crack your toes, that really gets their spine tingling.  Not only is it not common, it sounds louder and more painful.

2) Bite your nails.  Just the sound of that can drive some people insane.

3) Keep staring at a certain part of someone’s body.  For instance, pretend you see a giant zit on someone’s cheek and keep staring at it to the point where they need to move away.

4) Be sloppy.  Untuck your shirt halfway, have a milk mustache, and have long fingernails (if you’re a guy) all at the same time.

5) Last but not least, Talk!  Talk about anything and everything.  See an ant, talk about it.  It must be touch for ants, huh?  Is that a tree?  What a nice tree.  You’re nice; why are you so nice, it’s amazing!  You know what’s amazing?  Magicians.  It’s not real magic though.  It looks like it though, but it’s just tricks.  Like in the song, you know, sing with me. “It’s tricky! It’s tricky!”.  What you don’t like singing?  It’s good for the heart….and so on.

William N. Eskridge, Jr. and Darren R. Spedale are the authors of Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We’ve Learned from the Evidence. Eskridge is the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at the Yale Law School. Spedale spent two years on a Fulbright Fellowship in Denmark researching Scandinavian same-sex partnerships. He received his J.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Stanford University, and continues his work on same-sex marriage through his pro bono activities.  Here, they comment on the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to uphold Prop 8.

The California Supreme Court’s decision upholding Proposition 8 will be analyzed as a referendum on gay marriage. That would be a mistake. There are much higher stakes in the case. At bottom, it posed the question, What is a Constitution for? The Justices did not address that issue explicitly, but their action spoke volumes.

Prop 8’s ratification by the voters in the 2008 election overrode the Court’s earlier decision invalidating the state’s marriage exclusion of lesbian and gay couples. Lesbian and gay couples challenged Prop 8 as an “unconstitutional constitutional amendment.” Their argument, rejected by the Court, was that Prop 8’s fundamental change in minority rights should have gone through the more deliberative process for constitutional “revisions.” California Attorney General Jerry Brown made a similar argument, that a Constitution cannot be amended to retract “inalienable” rights.

At war in the Prop 8 case were two competing visions of what a Constitution is for. Representing the supporters of Prop 8, former Judge Kenneth Starr argued that a Constitution (or at least the California one) is an expression of the values held by the citizenry. To use Aristotle’s language, the Constitution is the “soul of the city.” Modernizing Aristotle, California provides its citizens with formal opportunities to express their constitutional commitments, through popular initiatives. Once the voters had spoken, the Court itself would have been engaging in unconstitutional usurpation if it had insisted on same-sex marriage.

Attorney General Brown and Shannon Minter (representing the challengers) argued that a Constitution demands more from the democratic process. Inspired by John Locke, their constitutional assumption is that the constitution is a social contract that guarantees basic rights to everyone. The Declaration of Independence called them “inalienable rights,” which means that even the Constitution cannot take them away without risking dissolution of the social contract. Because the Court itself had in 2008 held that marriage was a fundamental, inalienable right for lesbian and gay couples, Brown and Minter maintained that Proposition 8 was a constitutional betrayal.

A superficial reading of the Court’s opinion suggests that Starr prevailed. The Court upheld Prop 8, consistent with Starr’s democratic updating of Aristotle. But the Court rejected Starr’s argument that Prop 8 nullified the estimated 18,000 same-sex marriages performed between June 15 and November 8, 2008. The effect of the Court’s interpretation is to recognize those marriages, consistent with Brown and Minter’s stance in the litigation.

What is one to make of this Solomonic resolution? It may have been politically motivated, splitting the baby so that neither side would feel disrespected, on an issue that evenly divides the citizenry. It may been motivated purely by rule of law considerations. The Court would have had to stretch its precedents to strike down Prop 8, but the well-established canon against retroactive application of new amendments provided a legally hard-to-question rationale for narrowly interpreting Prop 8.

In our view, the Court was operating, at least in part, under a third understanding of what a Constitution is for. Constitutions establish processes for deliberation about important policies and values we should commit ourselves to. A Deliberative Constitution keeps the channels of political discussion open, insists that representative bodies be accountable to the people, and from time to time nudges the political process.

This is probably what the Court was up to. On the one hand, the Justices were persuaded that citizens were not settled in the gay marriage debate. Even as it allowed Prop 8, the Court reminded voters that a future initiative could overturn its rule. The Court was channeling both supporters and opponents of gay marriage back to the persuasive process; judges would not decide the issue for the people.

On the other hand, the Justices gave a nudge to that deliberation by validating the existing gay marriages. This provided an opportunity for gay marriage supporters to falsify stereotypes of gay people as anti-family. (The biggest anti-gay trope, and one exploited during the Prop 8 campaign, is that rights for gay people will corrupt children.) These lesbian and gay married families might also put to the test traditionalist arguments that gay marriage is bad for the community.

Gay marriage will still come to California, through a future initiative rather than a judicial decision. As we argued in our recent book, the new wave of marriage recognition has been coming in state legislatures (Vermont and Maine, with others to come).