Casting Spells

This post is quickly following the one before it, so make sure you check out my review of Matilda by Roald Dahl!

"I had a full tank and a good sense of direction and the growing certainty that Sugar Maple wasn't what it seemed. And maybe neither was Chloe." -Luke MacKenzie from Casting Spells (p 265)

A gift from my mother, Casting Spells by Barbara Bretton has sat on my shelf for almost 2 years now, and I have been eyeing it curiously all the while not being able to pick it up because of some other book at the time. Well I could kick myself for not picking it up sooner!

I gave in and moved on from the book I was reading since I was pretty sure I had already read it in the past and I needed something light, upbeat, maybe romantic, and catching to distract me during 2 A.M. feedings. Boy did I find exactly that in this cozy novel!

Chloe Hobbs lives in a small town called Sugar Maple where nothing is as it seems. Firstly, Chloe owns one of the top knitting shops in New England where people can drop a house payment on yarn, never noticing the basket in the corner that never looks touched even after hours of knitting; secondly, the town seems to be an exact replica of the town of Salem down to the miniature lighthouse that no ship docking a hundred miles away can see; and thirdly, the town is protected by an ancient spell cast by one of Chloe's ancestors to protect it's magical inhabitants from the outside world. That is until an outsider dies inside city limits and the town has to welcome a cop from Boston who is there to make sure everything about the woman's death is as accidental and simple as the town is claiming it is. And to make things worse, while the fate of the town rests on Chloe to keep the family line, and therefore the protective spell, going, she is finding herself falling for the very unmagical human cop Luke MacKenzie.

Barbara Bretton does an excellent job giving life to Chloe! Her character is stubborn, down to Earth, and scatter brained, all of which makes it easier to relate to her and accept her quirky habits and life. I loved her and her friends, and greatly enjoyed reading about the adventure she is thrown on against her will! While bits of the narrative did at times seem repetitive, I enjoyed the back and forth point of views of Luke and Chloe that allowed the reader to see the town from one of its own as well as an outsider. I also enjoyed the fact that although the passion between the characters is supposed to be off the scale, they manage to keep it toned down seeing as how they are not supposed to be together. I am not big on reading about someone else's steamy, clothes flying, all over the place, sex lives, and in this book I didn't have to.

So if you like a bit of humor, love, chaos, and magic, I recommend you pick up this one. I really enjoyed it to the point where I didn't want to go back to bed at 3 A.M. but instead considered staying up to read the last 50 pages. It was fun to read!