Thank you to Charish Reid’s team for sending me an ARC copy to read!
✨ paranormal activity 🌳 nature witches 💁🏽♂️ he’s a burly virgin who wants to be a baker 👴🏼 his dad is mean but gets it together 👹 horror scenes 😌 a healthy dose of steam.
I’ll Conjure for You is a book about two people, Helen and Everett, who are really falling for each other and who discover Everett’s grandmother’s house is haunted, kind of possessed, and since Helen is a witch, they work together to exorcise a demon while falling in love.
The overall story is super interesting to me. All that conjure stuff is right up my alley, so I was really excited to read this.
I felt Reid maybe went too deep into both the romance and paranormal sides of the story. There was a lot going on and not really much time to process or wind down so I never really got the chance to feel like I was “in” the story. These two sisters, Helen and Whitney, who have kind of a reputation in their town for being witches, a family history, a romantic interest, some 🔥heat!🔥 And then a love interest who has issues with their father, is changing careers, not to mention a gnarly entity living in his grandmother’s house, and he’s a virgin, all in 267 digital pages. See what I mean?
One of the places where I felt like this really showed up was with Helen’s confidence in her abilities. At first it seemed like she wasn’t confident at all, but then she’s able to see some pretty intense results quickly and her confidence seems to flip in that one moment. I didn’t read the first book, so there might be some important backstory or context there.
The dialog: in some places it can feel like it's stuffed or there's extra, sometimes too much information in the dialog. In one scene for example, there’s talk about an air conditioner that's not working very well. Everett rolls his eyes. Says: “What did I tell you about that thing? I rushed ordered a new unit from Syracuse yesterday. It should arrive tomorrow.” In the context of the scene it read to me like Everett was speaking to us, the reader, sharing a thing we should know to set up a future scene, rather than sharing info with the people he is speaking to.
Maybe another example is the sisters using this term “witchy” over and over again. It sounds like: ‘I did something witchy’ and ‘you did something witchy’ or ‘that was pretty witchy’.
I feel like if they are really about that life they would use more specific terms to describe what was done, like, you know, talking about energy or chakras manifesting something in 3d experience. They call what Helen did in the woods ‘witchy’, … which… felt to me like they were talking like that for my benefit as a reader rather than describing actually floating; weightlessness, working the elements; working air, working fire, etc. I feel like the author's trying to tell me what to think. Like they have written this book for people who are just learning about these things or who have maybe gathered their information from social media apps or they have a very surface level knowledge.
Overall the story was one of the more interesting ones I’ve read this year. With everything going on I did feel emotionally drawn in, even if there were parts where I felt I had to be a bit generous. The paranormal moments really left a chill through my body and then the hot scenes were actually really hot! It all culminated in a cozy, satisfying ending. It could have been 100 more moving, enjoyable pages. Easy.