★★★☆☆ Veterinarian to magic creatures

The Magic and the Healing

Nick O'Donohoe

I believe I read The Magic and the Healing not long after it came out in 1994. I liked it and went on to read the rest of the Crossroads trilogy. The whole thing had a clumsy feel, as if it was the work of an inexperienced author. Although that is not quite true, it is close. Nick O'Donohoe published a book in 1981, April Snow, which was apparently entirely forgettable. Crossroads did better -- each of the three titles has a rating exceeding 4.0 on Goodreads. The books themselves, however, appear to be out of print, and neither of my local libraries has copies, so one has to guess their commercial success was limited.

The protagonist is a veterinary student, BJ Vaughan, about to leave school because of some personal crises. She's your standard "gifted-but-unsuccessful" sympathetic hero. One of her profs, who believes she is a gifted vet, recruits her to come to the Crossroads, where she heals a unicorn and subsequently other magical creatures. Eventually she helps recruit friends to the Crossroads. I particularly remember one of them later remarking that after treating werewolves, a Doberman is just a puppy.

The scenes in which Vaughan and other characters treated animals had an authentic feel. I suspect Nick O'Donohoe himself has experienced vet school and practice. I just did a search for biographical information and came up with nothing. The paperback The Magic and the Healing has no author biography. It does have an Acknowledgements section, which acknowledges some vets.

I think I would now call this Urban Fantasy, although that category wasn't recognized (at least not by me) when it was published. I give it my tentative recommendation -- tentative because I read it almost 30 years ago. That I still remember the contents after so much time in itself speaks well for the book.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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