Swaying palm trees, gently crashing waves, permanently blue skies… all absolutely crap mood-makers for the current holiday. Where are the orange leaves furiously shaking in their last dance? The scrape of a tortured tree against a wood-frame house? The strange hooting sounds coming from the newly dark and damp forest? Where are the spice pumpkin lattes?
I’m in Southern Portugal at the moment – yes, I know, it’s hard to be me – and struggling to conjure up anything more seasonally appropriate than a cup of cinnamon apple tea. Occasionally, a stray black cat will cross my path, or a neighbour burns some excess palm leaves, giving the air just a hint of autumnal haze, but otherwise the equinox atmosphere is best left to the imagination. Except I am pretty damn exhausted atm. My entire bandwidth of imagination is allotted to my own creations – currently a group of Victorians sweating it out in their corsets during a long summer – so I want a little help in that department.
Enter 2021’s bumper crop of witchy Romances. Future cultural commentators will no doubt cobble together some theory about why the pandemic saw a surging interest in magical, mega-powerful women with impeccable eyelining skills. I’m just glad the witches have come to my rescue. I lucked out even further because one of my favourite Romance pods, Learning the Tropes, dedicated the month to all things witchy, so I had the rundown of three puntastic titles to choose from. Time for a Blood Sisters Halloween special!
“Kelsey, it’s a full moon. Can we please read Payback’s a Witch? It’s pitched as L-word meets Sabrina. But it’s more L-word meets John Tucker Must Die.” Really, what could be cuter than a sweet little witch called Emmy returning to her magic hometown and facing down the ghost of boyfriends’ past with the help of his exes and gets her hot high school crush in the process? Ahem. Yes, well….
Dear readers, shall I first give my take on this book, or should we just let Kelsey blaze through with her scorched earth approach? Yep, I agree, let’s get that one out of the way. One mitigating circumstance I would like to mention first is that Kelsey is an artist and crafter extraordinaire. Soooo when Emmy, the book’s citified witch heroine, throws shade on her cousin for personally embellishing her cloak with cross-stitching? Yeah, that didn’t go down terribly well:
Unless the resolution of this book is “I am sorry Cousin Daliah, I am a huge asshole who has squandered the gifts the gods gave me by being a basic bitch, here, you are the real heir to House Harlow,” there is no saving her now. She is dead to me [insert several skulls and crossbones here].
Whew, OKAY. So the stakes were already high. For our book club at least. For Emmy, the return home was going pretty damn well as she multitasked refereeing some magical tournament while checking out her admittedly smoking hot competing crush. Castaway in the land of unending summer, I was gobbling up the myriad descriptions of perfect autumn weather, perfect pumpkin patches, and perfect temperature tea. I was worried the magic tournament scenes would drag a little – not a Harry Potter fan! – but the author cracked through them with verve and style. And the ‘sexy tundra wolf’ love interest was very appealing. All brittle goth on the outside and gooey souffle on the inside. Still, the essence of the heroine eluded me…
She is a teenager! It all makes sense now.
I read the beginning of a midnight rant from my East Coast bestie through my morning-matted lashes.
She is a teenager in grownup drag with a teenage fantasy of what adulthood looks like: I get a cute haircut and go to college and get a tattoo of my college mascot. I get an apartment of my very own in a big city, and I work at a really cool company that sells, like, super goth witch stuff, that’s super hot. I do really well, and get promoted and stuff. And then when I come back home to visit, the guy who broke my heart will see me be so hot and successful and stuff. Every time we talk, I’m gonna be so smart and scathing, and he will have absolutely zero comeback to any of my put downs.
Ooof! I analysed this body slam over my morning tea. Much as I was enjoying the book, maybe this takedown of the MC was more than a crafters grudge. Emmy’s high school trauma – the boyfriend chucking her because she’s not from a magically powerful family – is super vivid. It has kept her away from her family, her friends, and her magical powers for a decade. Yet her present-day hang-ups are basically nil. She slides confidently into her fab new job and assertively pursues her dream girl. If I was so sad about not being a bad-ass witch that I went into exile, watching my new girlfriend transport across a lake on ectoplasm might make me just a teensy bit jealous. Emmy just thinks it’s hot.
Maybe it’s this adolescent energy that makes this book a good autumnal comfort read; the fantasy that all the demons are all on the outside. The forces of darkness, embodied by the douche ex and his power-hungry family, were frightening and unassailable from a distance. But once Emmy and her hot girl gang get up in their faces, the spell that has prevented her from returning home is broken. Just like the horror movies I loved as a teenager, the jeopardy is fake and you’re safely at home.
Even a basic bitch of a witch knows that’s where the real magic’s at.
