Payback's a Witch: an absolutely spellbinding romcom (The Witches of Thistle Grove)

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That was the thing about growing up with magic. Until you left it behind for good, you had no idea how incredible it felt just to be around it. I love the trope of a character returning to their hometown after an extended absence. As someone who moved away from my own hometown as soon as I graduated high school, I can totally relate to those feelings.

I guessed what the second book would be about even before reading the blurb about that and I will be reading that. Out of the adult witchy books from 2021, I think this is the best even though this could be better.The main champion of the tournament. The one everyone assumes is going to win. That guy is the evil ex that drove her away in the first place. You know that selfish ex that you can’t believe you tolerated? First of all, it's supposed to be an adult book but pretty much everything reads like YA with sex scenes thrown in there. Now, I love YA but when I am promised an adult book, I expect an adult book, not YA. So this was a letdown.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets The L Word in this fresh, sizzling New York Times bestselling rom-com by Lana Harper. I did have one slight issue with the world-building, and that is the way Chicago is presented and talked about in this book (mostly in the context of Emmy talking about it). To be fair, this may not bother any reader who is not actually intimately familiar with Chicago, but I found all of the hyper-specific name-dropping of real Chicago businesses and places to be jarring and distracting when all of the true action and plot in the book takes place in a fictional, magical town. Part of this is definitely because I couldn’t help but over-analyze the type of person who would list the types of things listed by Emmy as her Chicago favorites (and the answer, to me, was more or less “basic White hipster,” which didn’t not jive with Emmy’s character, but again, distracting.) TLDR: I absolutely recommend this one to readers looking for good Halloween books. I think this book will have a wide appeal to many different readers and it was good fun too. I really enjoyed the writing and I hope Harper will write more sapphic stories, in the future, as I would love to read them. This was really enjoyable and I hope this will be out on audio as I think the writing style would transfer very well and I would definitely buy it. With the approach of a traditional spell-casting tournament occurring in Thistle Grove, Emmy finally decides to return for an extended visit. Her parents will be so happy.

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The dialogue also felt very YA, and not in a good way. I cringed at the constant use of social media slang and at the forced banter between the characters. Call me old fashioned, but I can’t stand authors who use hashtags and internet acronyms in their prose, especially when they also try to counter-balance the juvenile language by dropping f-bombs every other line. This is like if the main character of every young adult series that romanticizes a toxic relationship. Picture Bella getting retribution over Edward. Buffy calling out the truth about Angel and Spike. Hermione not tolerating Ron’s selfish behavior? Because of the focus on language, the worldbuilding is phenomenal. I would say that it even rivals that of Harry Potter, with the way that magic works and the little idiosyncrasies that are explained throughout the book. There’s an intricate complexity to the magic described that shows the author put a lot of time and effort into constructing this fantastical world. The book is rife with magical history, for the town and the founding families. The wrongness of it whipped through me, along with a bitter tinge of regret that I'd let my connection to this place snuff out so thoroughly that I hadn't even known about any of this. I might have forged a new life away from Thistle Grove, but this was still the town that grew and made me. I owed it to my own family, as well as the Thorns and Avramovs, to help right its foundering balance. During her time in Chicago, she's felt her powers waning. Apparently, it's important for her to remain somewhat tied to her magical roots.