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Marieke Lexmond reads tarot cards, loves food, photography, and travel. She has three sassy little dogs that she likes to take everywhere and even have their own Instagram account @urbandogsquad. Her background in filmmaking enabled her to travel and live around the globe. Storytelling is in her blood, from saving her allowance from a very young age to buy books to her master's degree from the Dutch Film Academy. Fantasy and science fiction are her favorite genres. She prefers to write fun and mystical stories. Her attraction to nature and places with a magical history brought her to New Orleans and the West Coast of Ireland. As a pagan, she felt an instant connection to the land; it feeds her imagination and has become the inspiration for the Madigan Chronicles.
Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
The magic continues in The Madigan Chronicles series by Marieke Lexmond, who has delivered book four in The Cup. Lexmond has a flair for cinematic landscape no matter what world[s] the characters inhabit. The Cup traverses London, Boston, New Orleans, the land of Fairy, and the gossamer of Between Space and Time. We now also follow Lucy into Greenland where she conjures the general location of the Cup of Plenty, also coveted by the Queen of Fairy via a deal struck with Mara, Lucy's granddaughter, who finds herself between a rock and a very cold place. Lucy has already killed one Guardian; the Guardian of the Dagger of Consciousness. Can Freya and Luna Madigan, Guardians of the Wand of Wisdom, get to Snowflake, a distant relative and Guardian of the Cup of Plenty, before their aunt? And will a Guardian of the Cup even listen?
“Oh, man. You witches have gotten to me.” That statement by Tom roundly sums up how I feel about The Madigan Chronicles and The Cup in particular. The water element out of the four powers needed to have some true time dedicated to it and author and tarot pro Marieke Lexmond came through for us. Readers who missed out on the other books and are not up to date could find it on the slightly difficult side to grasp what is happening. Lexmond drops breadcrumbs of backstory but there are a lot of places, many point-of-view characters, and about eleventy bajillion things that can be going on at any given time. Paintings that suck non-consenting participants into mass orgies are a thing and so are working shell phones. That's not a typo. It's a shell phone. The dynamics between parents and children, partners and spouses, and family, in general, are further fleshed out for the cast. I like the ribbing between Crone and Mother, elevated when one gets to tell the other she told them so. Coincidentally, I tell people that too when they come back and say they are new Marieke Lexmond fans...and the interspersed art by Nicole Ruijgrok is the icing.
