A sweet and satisfying modern fantasy novel about two very different girls who each feel like outsiders, but who must unite to try and save their magical town from a spell gone awry—and maybe get their dads to date in the process.
Twelve-year-old Wini’s dad Marcus and aunt Maddie run a bakery in the town of Honeycrisp Hill, Rhode Island, a magical haven of the modern world. Their baking magic creates enchanted items like Carefree Lemon Curd Cupcakes and Calming Croissants, but the bakery is struggling as the cost of special enchanted ingredients rises—and business isn’t helped by the fact that everyone in town blames her family for the curse that Wini’s birth mother Coraline (Marcus’s sister) put on the town. Now, no enchanter can leave without losing their magic forever.
Wini thinks she may have found a way to save her family’s business (and maybe get her dad a date) with a (sort of) illegal spell to create and capture Love. But when dark and mysterious things start happening in town, she realizes the spell has gone awry and she doesn’t know how to fix it. She knows she’s an enchanter, not an evil witch like her mother was, but the townfolk will still see her as bad. Soon, an agent of the Enchantment Agency is snooping around town looking to dole out punishment on the person who cast it.
Twelve-year-old Kal is new to town, having lived in the non-magical world most of her life with her single dad, Lachlan. Kal and her dad, who has magic based on the power of words, have come to town to revive an old, possibly haunted, bookstore, his lifelong dream. Unexpectedly, his own long-absent father, Kal’s grandfather Ian, comes along, too, although as a former witch hunter, he seems to have secrets of his own.
Kal is unsure of herself in this new world, which isn’t helping her anxiety (for which she has non-judgmentally been seeing a therapist). When she and Wini meet, they don’t initially get along, but soon find comfort in their shared outsider status—anxious newbie Kal and confident but ostracized Wini. It’s clear, too, that their dads are falling for each other. As the wicked chaos in the town grows, Wini and Kal try to work together to make things right, and in the process, they uncover the secret of what really happened to the town many years ago.
Author Alechia Dow gives us the action and thrill of classic fantasy tales, with magical objects, haunted woods, and evil ghosts, but also looks thoughtfully at each girl’s struggle to find her place, weaving in a powerful but not pedantic theme about the power of love and family. The dual-perspective narrative of Wini and Kal offers distinct perspectives on their richly imagined world, which has a depth and originality that rivals that of many other stories about magical enclaves. (I’m looking at you, Harry.) Several actual baking recipes are included throughout the book—Dow is a former pastry chef, so you know they’ll be good.
A tasty treat, and highly recommended. We can only hope there’s a spell to create a sequel.
Wini and her family are Black; Wini is described as “chunky”; Kal and her dad are White, and her mom is from Chile. Kal’s dad is said to be “queer,” and implied to be bi/pansexual, since he had a fling with Kal’s mom to have her. (Her birth mom visits occasionally, “more of an acquaintance” than family.) Two other same-sex couples play smaller roles.
