The publishers weren’t kidding when they mentioned endless cups of tea. Regular tea, sweet tea, magical tea, charmed tea, tea with a little boost etc. Much of the plot and general style of writing feels like a predictable cozy, modern fantasy, mystery romance, including an elegant older vampire love interest and a lycanthrope who has himself chained up in his basement at, “that time of the month”. And this sort of sly poking fun at genre tropes is part of what lifts this book above the generic mush beneath it. The other really interesting thing about this book and series is the main character. Eventually, it appears that there are at least two magic related reasons why the main characters’ memory is so bad, but the way she’s written makes it unclear whether magic is the issue or something else. She reminds me of my uncle Larry and my dad when they were just starting to show signs of dementia. The main character is well written and I feel a lot of sympathy and compassion for her. An important aspect of this book is walking with this character in her struggles to try to build a good life for herself and her daughter, absorb and understand her inherited abilities and discover that perhaps her memory and brain fog issues are caused by or at least significantly contributed to by a network of spells. And learning who by and why the spells were cast. I am enjoying this series and unique main character.

Pointless and frustrating conversation[s] went on and on. An idiotic yet sympathetic mother and rude demanding daughter make the first third oof this book painful. So full of anticipation after reading the Crone series, I actually DNF even book 1.