Based on the TV series Charmed created by Constance M. Burge.
New to the Halliwell family of witches, young Paige finds herself alone while her two sisters are busy elsewhere. She heads upstairs to spend her alone time with the Book of Shadows, a collection of information and spells created by the witch ancestors of the current three Halliwell sisters.
Paige is browsing through the book when she finds a spell for shapeshifting. She decides to try out the spell because the power to shapeshift is one her two sisters don't have and that is appealing to Paige. As she rushes to gather all the items needed for casting the spell, she fails to read to spell instructions all the way through.
The spell works and Paige finds herself turned into a kitty cat. But when her sisters return home, Paige realizes she doesn't know how to stop being a cat. And her sisters are surprised to find a strange cat in their house and she is captured and hauled off to an animal shelter.
At the shelter, Paige is quickly adopted by a man and taken away by him to a meeting of a small cult calling themselves the Disciples of Thoth. Paige becomes the focus of a ceremony being performed by the cult members, lead by the man who adopted her from the animal shelter, Tyler Carlson.
The center of attention, Tyler and Paige abide while the acolytes chant and the two vanish from modern times and find themselves back in ancient Egypt, in a temple dedicated to the cat god Bastet. And find themselves surrounded by hostile guards and hysterical priests, accused of being foreign spies. Locked away in prison cell with no way out, even Paige's witch powers don't work because the walls of the prison are covered with anti-magic spells that nullify her powers.
Meanwhile, back in current times, the sisters have figured out what Paige did and are on her trail. They soon understand that Paige and Tyler are in ancient Egypt and they use their magic powers to travel into the past after her. Ending up in the same temple in which Paige and Tyler had appeared, they see a cat in the temple and assume it is Paige and grab it and take it back to their present time. They perform a spell to return Paige to her human form and the spell works but the woman who appears is not Paige. She is Hoptith and she was condemned to be confined a cat form because she was an evil and dangerous witch. And now she is thrilled to be herself again and she has all sorts of plans that don't bode well for either the past or the present.
This was an OK read, if a bit juvenile. I was not familiar with the TV series when I got the book but it sounded like a fun read. It was a bit chaotic and the action often happens with little explanation and lots of improbable coincidences. Like what are the odds that when the two sisters change the temple cat into a person, it turns out to be a powerful and dangerous witch bent on world domination? Or that when Paige, in her cat form, is dropped off at the animal shelter, she is immediately adopted by a man who wants to use the cat in a magical ritual that very night? Too juvenile in tone for me.
