CBR18 Book 36: "Under Your Spell" by Laura Wood

Page count: 352 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Monthly Keyword 26: Spell

Buzzword Cover 26: Music

Clementine "Clemmie" Monroe has a lot of trust issues, and they're all because of the men in her life. Clemmie is one of three sisters, born within three months of one another, from three very different women who all got knocked up by her carefree rock star father, Rip Harris. Instead of being jealous or upset about the fact that her husband had been unfaithful, Clemmie's mother divorced her father, bought a large house and invited the two other women to live with her. So while Clemmie has been unlucky in the father department, she's basically had three mothers and two ride or die sisters supporting her while growing up. 

Unfortunately, even when her father proved time and time again that he couldn't really be trusted to remember things like visitations or special events in his daughters' lives, Clemmie kept hoping against hope that he would someday be better. Her trust issues with men did not get better after her first relationship ended with the guy, who had already been emotionally manipulating her for a long time, dumping her to go take a job as a drummer in her father's band. Clemmie has sworn to never have anything to do with musicians ever since.

Going in a vastly different direction with her next long-term relationship, Clemmie chose someone reliable and safe (and extremely boring, according to her sisters), but ended up heartbroken all the same. Her very boring boyfriend of several years not only dumped her to move in with another woman, but even had the audacity to take her cat when he left! Then she is fired, and has no idea how she's going to keep paying for her flat, since she now has to cover all the rent herself.

The first time Clemmie went through a bad breakup, her sisters supported her, and they had a witchy ceremony casting what they named "the Breakup spell", where they cursed the man who wronged her and each made wishes for what the future would bring for her. Now they get her drunk and resurrect the spell. It involves a lot of candles, Fleetwood Mac on a portable speaker, and then the women cast three wishes and a curse. The curse is for Clemmie's disappointing boyfriend to never satisfy anyone sexually ever again (and have a permanent itchy groin rash). Clem's record executive sister wishes her to have hot sex (both her sisters feel that some casual hook-ups would be exactly what the doctor ordered, mainly because Clem has never done casual in her life), Clem herself wishes for a job doing what she loves, while Clem's sensitive indie musician sister Lil wishes for "big love, the unconditional, wholehearted, soul mate kind."

After completing the ritual, the sisters get bad news. Their 'uncle Carl', their father's manager and the man who frequently stepped in when Rip once again completely forgot about important things in his daughters' lives, has passed away. After his funeral, Clem tries to hide away in her childhood bedroom, only to find that an extremely hot man has already hidden in there. After some flirty bantering and quite a bit of tequila, Serena's wish for Clem comes true. She has a one-night stand with the man she thinks is called Edward, and then sneaks away in the morning, leaving him a note.

Of course, this wouldn't be much of a romance novel if things didn't get complicated. Clem's wish was for a job, and her sister Serena has one for her, which will pay extremely well and allow her to hang out in their grandmother's house in Northumberland (which is being renovated for holiday rentals). All she has to do is babysit one of the world's most famous rock stars for six weeks, making sure he actually completes the album for the record company Serena works for. Despite one sister being a cutthroat record company exec and the other a darling on the indie music scene, Clem's dislike of all things music means she needs to be reminded who this Theo James even is. On the other hand, this is why Serena is convinced she will be perfect for the job. Theo James may be world-famous and extremely good-looking, but Clem's aversion to anything to do with the music business will ensure things will stay professional. 

It will surprise no one who has read more than a few books in their life that the man Clem is going to be paid to spend six weeks in a remote location is none other than her one-night-stand (who was never called Edward, but hadn't even realised that Clem got his name wrong until he saw the note she left the next morning).

So Clemmie and Theo, and their sizzling sexual chemistry, are living in forced proximity in a remote area of the north of England, and need to keep things entirely professional. At first, they barely speak, but then they gradually develop a friendship. Even when Clem is starting to reconsider her rule about never getting involved with musicians, Theo keeps things friendly but platonic. Whoever heard of a superstar musician who respects boundaries? 

This book started out slow, but even before the main romance (and its many complications) was introduced, Clemmie and her two sisters had me hooked. I would happily have read a non-romance book about their relationship. Since the majority of contemporary romance novels I read are set in the US, it's also always nice to read something set in the UK, and especially a part of it I'm actually quite familiar with.

Clem and Theo are very sweet together. This book has one of my favourite tropes, where one of the characters has to nurse the other one back to health. There are also some background subplots involving Clem's sisters, who, over the course of the book, get exactly what they wished for when casting the breakup spell, which is nicely done by the author. 

I had never even heard of Laura Wood when I bought this book in an e-book sale several years ago, and if it hadn't been for it fitting into several of my reading challenges, and I felt like reading a romance over some of the other options available, this may have stayed forgotten on my digital bookshelves for years. Instead, I put my entire reading list on hold after completing it, so I could purchase the sequel/companion book, about Theo's best friend and binge-read that too.

Judging a book by its cover: While I complain a lot about modern romance covers and the interchangeable pastel-coloured covers with little cartoon characters on it, I think this may just be a bit too plain and non-descript. One of the reasons I kept forgetting this book exists is that the cover just isn't very exciting. If it hadn't fit into one of my reading challenges, I would possibly never have gotten to it. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR18 Book 33: "A Marvellous Light" by Freya Marske

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Monthly Keyword 26: Light

Nowhere Book Bingo 26: LGBTQIA+ rep

Buzzwords Challenge 26: Parts of a house

Buzzwords Cover Challenge 26: Featuring a silhouette

Sir Robert "Robin" Blyth ends up in a civil service position he is vastly unprepared for, as it turns out, he is supposed to be a liaison between the secret magical world and the more mundane regular world. Usually, the post is held by an individual from a magical family just unlucky enough not to have any magic of their own (seems like there are quite a few such "duds" in the magic-wielding families of society). Robin, on the other hand, is both shocked and rather intrigued when his co-liasion, Edwin Courcey, has to reveal the existence of magic to him. 

Edwin Courcey is both annoyed and worried at the disappearance of Robin's predecessor, especially when it becomes clear very quickly that something sinister is probably to blame. When Robin is attacked and a curse is placed upon him, a side-effect also appears to be that he can now receive visions of the future. Unfortunately, they are vague and usually seem to involve strangers. The curse is visible as a strange tattoo on one of Robin's arms, and with each new excruciatingly painful attack, the tattoo climbs higher up his arm, and the pain increases. Edwin can't leave an innocent man who didn't even know magic existed, least of all, where some magical artefact that the villains are searching for is located, suffer and potentially die. Unfortunately, most of the reference books he requires are at his family home, and Edwin doesn't exactly love returning to the bosom of his family.

Edwin may have magical powers, but he is seen as a huge disappointment in the Courcey family. He reluctantly goes back home, bringing Robin with him, to try to find a way to lift the curse. Edwin's plan is basically to get rid of Robin's pesky curse and then magically make him forget he ever even heard of magic (which seems to be the standard way magicians deal with regular humans). There is also the mystery of where Robin's predecessor disappeared to, the identity of the shadowy individuals who cursed Robin, and exactly what the artefact they are looking for is. 

This has been on my TBR list for a long time. I was initially waiting for the trilogy, of which this is the first part, to be completed, but by the time that happened, I sort of forgot about the whole series. This year, it fit into several of my reading challenges, however. As so many online friends whose opinions in books I trust have rated it highly on Goodreads, it felt like it was time to pull it off my shelf (I keep all of my unread dead tree books in a bookshelf in my bedroom, in the hopes that it might make me read them faster. Once I finish one, it gets moved up to the living room, where the majority of our fiction books are located.) Since I read this in mid-April and have since completed 22 other books, some of the finer details of the plot are now rather hazy to me. The book starts a bit slow, but once Robin is attacked and cursed, and Edwin realises that he has no choice but to help this handsome golden retriever of a man, I was pretty hooked. 

The book is set in Edwardian times, in an alternate history England where magic obviously exists. Robin and Edwin are pretty much opposites, with Robin being, as I previously mentioned, much like a golden retriever, while Edwin is a skittish black cat. Because Edwin has always been made to feel like a failure in his own family and generally lacking among his magical peers, he's got quite a big chip on his shoulder, and Robin's charming himbo ways are both attractive and frustrating to him. 

This is a slow-burn romance, but once the men actually admit their feelings for one another (and Edwin gets over a lot of his trust issues), the relationship between them is so beautiful. I also very much liked several of the supporting female characters, including Robin's younger sister (who I think is one of the protagonists of the second novel) and Robin's extremely overqualified and underestimated secretary in the civil service. They were both great.

There's clearly an overarching plot to the series, and some sort of mysterious cult of bad guys who will need to be stopped. However, this book also has a self-contained ending, and I didn't feel the need to rearrange my entire TBR list to read the two sequels right away (I will try to get to them before the end of the year, though). 

Judging a book by its cover:

I think the cover of this book is my least favourite thing about it. I have never liked the colour orange, and the orange silhouettes, accompanied by the most hideously busy wallpaper pattern covering the rest of the book, it gives me a headache if I look too closely at it. I would never ever have picked up this book if I hadn't been assured by several people that I trust that it was excellent. I find this cover very ugly. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR18 Book 28: "The Familiar" by Leigh Bardugo

Page count: 385 pages

Audio book length: 12 hrs 57 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Dark Corner Selection: March 2026

Defeat the Goblin TBR 26: The Bog book - A book you started, but never finished (started it in May 2025, but only made it about 30%)

Buzzword Cover Challenge 26: Metallic element

In a different version of 16th-century Spain, young Luzia Cortado works grudgingly as a scullery maid for the miserable and petty Doña Valentina. Luzia can use what she calls "small magics" to make her life easier. She can mend seams, multiply the groceries, unburn bread or reassemble broken things. She performs these little spells, learned from generations of her Jewish ancestors, by singing quietly. Luzia is a convert; she dutifully goes to Mass and hides any traces of her Jewish lineage to escape the clutches of the Inquisition. 

However, when Doña Valentina discovers Luzia's powers, she sees an opportunity to increase her social standing. She makes Luzia perform for dinner guests, and before long, powerful and ambitious men show interest in Luzia's abilities. To improve her abilities, she is put under the tutelage of the mysterious Santangel, rumoured to be immortal. 

This book, a medieval alternate history, is very different from all of Leigh Bardugo's previous books. As someone with a Master's degree in European medieval history, I was really interested in this book, yet when I first tried reading it, in 2025, I couldn't get very far into it, and eventually decided to put it down until the time was right.

This year, my book club decided to vote for most of our books of the month. When The Familiar became the book of the month for March, I figured it was a sign from the universe that now the time was right. While I made it all the way through this time, I can see why I put it down the first time. It has a very slow start, something that was also remarked on by many of the members of my book club. I did discover that had I just kept going for a few more chapters the first time, I would have finished it. 

I really liked the unusual setting for this book. I liked that it tells the story of three very different women (Luzia, Valentina, and Luzia's aunt), who are all just trying for a better life. The magic used is interesting. I agree with several of the members of my book club that the romantic subplot involving Luzia and Santangel is entirely unnecessary, and that the conclusion of it is frankly quite disturbing, if you think about the power dynamics of the whole thing. There is also a lesbian subplot introduced towards the end that was definitely a bit unexpected, and considering how much is made of the power of the Inquisition and how feared they are, it seemed unlikely that these women would have been able to safely and rather publicly make a life with one another. But that's a minor niggle. 

I hope this remains a standalone book and that Bardugo doesn't decide to write a sequel at some point. 

Judging a book by its cover: Even with the scorpion crawling out of the lacy sleeve, this cover seems more like it belongs on a historical literary fiction book. Except for the name of the author, there is really nothing that marks this out as fantasy. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR18 Book 26: "The Magician's Daughter" by H.G. Parry

Page count: 372 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Defeat the Goblin TBR 26: The Magic book - A book with a magic system, or magic-related system (this one has both)

Buzzword Reading Challenge 26: Occupations

Buzzword Cover Challenge 26: Wings

Biddy lives on a small, magically isolated island off the coast of Ireland with her guardian/foster father, Rowan, and his familiar, the rabbit Hutchincroft. No one who doesn't know that it's there can find it. While Biddy has no magic of her own, she has grown up with it all around her. Yet magic is fading in the outside world, and far too often, Rowan has to leave Biddy to go to the mainland in bird form to find some small reserves of it. She hates it, but he is always back before dawn.

Then one night, Rowan doesn't come back, and Biddy, desperate to find him, uses a magical ring that allows her to travel through his nightmares to find him. He's been captured by powerful enemies and can only escape with Biddy's help. Once he returns home, shaken and weak, he tells Biddy a lot of things previously kept hidden. Not only that, but after telling Biddy that she cannot leave the island, because it wouldn't be safe, he now needs her to go to London, in disguise, to act as a distraction for his enemies. 

The real world is a big and scary place, and it doesn't take long for Biddy to discover that Rowan may not have been telling the whole truth, or has possibly just badly underestimated the forces against him. Rowan ends up captured once again, while Biddy is in terrible danger. Nevertheless, she needs to be brave and resourceful in order to not only save Rowan's life, but possibly restore magic to the world once more. 

Back in 2020, my book club read The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heap, and while it was fine, it also didn't make me run out and read more from the author. I'm not actually sure I remembered what else I had read by the author when I picked this out in a 3 for 2 sale. I just really liked the pretty cover, and the title sounded interesting. As so often happens, it went on a shelf, and I forgot all about it. Then it turned up on my friend Ashley's Vlog, as one of 11 underrated books more people need to read, and since Ashley and I still like a lot of the same books, a recommendation from her means I need to read it (unless it's horror, of course, I'm most likely not going to want to read those). 

Once a year, five of my friends and I try to take a weekend away from our families, and we go on a cabin trip. While two are childless by choice, the rest of us have children, and just getting a weekend away to relax is a massive luxury. So of course, I was going to get lots of reading done, and this was one of the books I brought along. I think I made it to page 25, because I was busy chatting and catching up with my friends, and was too tired by the time bedtime came around to get anything much read at all.

So it took me a while to properly start this book, but when I finally did, it didn't take long before I didn't want to put it down. Biddy is an engaging heroine. She's curious and spends the first part of the book restless and frustrated that Rowan won't ever let her leave the island to explore. She's inquisitive and lonely, but when it finally becomes time to leave her safe home for the first time, it's with the knowledge that she's basically "bait" and could be in a lot of danger. To help Rowan, she's nevertheless willing to do it. She makes one of her first friends ever at the depressing, poverty-stricken children's home she's sent to live and work at. 

Once the danger ramps up, she is naturally very scared, but doesn't let it stop her from acting. She meets several people from Rowan's past; one very sinister, one deeply terrifying and one who may turn out to be a useful ally. 

My favourite supporting character was Hutchincroft, Rowan's bunny familiar. He can use magic to turn himself human, on occasion, so he and Biddy can speak (he speaks telepathically to Rowan), but a lot of the time, he's just a big, soft rabbit. I wish the reader could have got a bit more insight into his and Rowan's connection, but with the entire POV being from Biddy, I guess we can't have everything.

Parry has a lovely turn of phrase, and this story was unusual and went some unexpected places. While I wasn't too curious about her other writing after the Uriah Heap book, this makes me think I should give her other books another chance. 

Judging a book by its cover: I really like the silhouettes on the cover, all very suitable. Young woman, bird, rabbit. I like the vines and flowers and the swirling patterns on the green background. What I don't like are the weird yellow spikes, like some sort of halo behind the woman's silhouette. Could absolutely have done without that. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read