This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.
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Some romance novels just feel like a warm hug, and Best Hex Ever definitely fits that bill – for the first half of the book. But then the love gets a little too instalusty, and the plot too weak. For all that, it initially feels like a tiny slice of fall, wrapped up in multicolored leaves and cups of apple cider. But I couldn’t go higher than a C- on it due to a few issues I had with the narrative.
Dina Whitlock is a kitchen witch who runs a small London restaurant called the Serendipity Cafe, a place where good things happen by fiat of magic tucked into the baked goods. Dina’s spells work on a combination of her own emotions and physical ingredients like cinnamon, and they are generally very good at spreading positive vibes.
While her baked goods are legendary, her magical powers are mainly a secret except to those who are closest to her. While they make everything around her delicious, Dina has been suffering from a mislaid love spell since she was a young baking school student. Any time she feels romantic or sexual attraction to someone, the hex attacks her or the object of her affection, drizzling misfortune and disaster everywhere. She has understandably remained single for some time.
British Museum curator Scott Mason manages to become the center of Dina’s bad luck hex after ordering a cup of hot earl grey and a croissant from her one morning. Scott is finally starting to heal after breaking up with a woman two years ago and isn’t looking for anything in particular, happily settling into life in London, including joining an amateur rowing team.
But Scott and Dina are instantly attracted to each other. Dina is aghast – she’s just done a tarot reading on herself and knows that way lies bad mojo. But Scott’s best friend Eric is marrying Dina’s best friend Immy, and they’re both in the wedding. They try to keep it friendly when they hie off to the hinterlands of England for the wedding weekend, even as the sexual tension between them threatens to subsume everything. Dina operates under a single burden – if Scott is the one, that means he’s going to die.
But might the cards be wrong? Is there a way away from the curse threatening to spoil Dina’s new romance? And can Dina’s mother and coven help?
There’s a good answer to those questions that I won’t spoil for you. Best Hex Ever has two charming protagonists, a lot of representation (the heroine is half-Moroccan and bisexual; the hero, as he frequently puts it, has two moms). When there is conflict, it’s the most reasonable ever laid out in a romance novel. Dina is sweet and nice and generous — well, at first. They are fairly cute together. If it weren’t so rushed, the romance would be no problem at all.
And yet I had two issues with the novel:
Spoilers under here
The way Dina’s bisexuality is portrayed didn’t quite sit right with me, and this is me speaking as a bisexual woman. The first woman that Dina ever loves is a pastry school classmate, Rory, who is freaked out by Dina’s use of magic. The relationship is the messiest in the book. Rory breaks up with her and Dina’s response is to cast a fate spell on her. The spell forces Rory to beg Dina to come back, but also results in her being in an accident. When Rory figures out what went wrong, she seems to reverse the curse onto Dina by mistake while firmly dumping her.
On top of all of this, Dina refuses to explain the backfired fate spell to her mother or her coven, because that would result in her admitting her bisexuality to her traditional-leaning mom, who’s still hoping she’ll produce grandchildren and thought Rory was a boy due to her gender-neutral name. So Dina suffers for decades due to her internalized homophobia. Her suffering was so prevalent in this part of the story that it felt overemphasized and forced, as if queer folks must go through a period of closeted self-hatred. It felt to me like more than a mere plot contrivance.
The big twist in the plot involves Dina coming out and accepting herself to break the (self-made) curse. The book treats this as a big twist but I saw it coming. This should be a good, affirmative plot arc.
But it feels extra hinky that the inciting relationship – the only same-sex one in the whole book – is portrayed as ugly, messy and controlling. It made me like Dina less, and it put a damper on my enjoyment of her relationship with Scott, which is portrayed in the book (of course) as the acme of sexual and romantic joy for her.
A number of other stereotypical plot details visit the plotline – there’s a U-Haul Lesbian joke, for instance. But at least we don’t get a babies-ever-after ending, and Scott and Dina stay childfree.
So much of this book started out wonderfully. And yet, thanks to my own lived experience, the entire effect ended up simply making me cringe.
The other problem I had is that the romance is very instalusty and moves way too fast. Like way too fast – a grand total of three weeks passes by from that first cup of earl grey to the inciting incident that causes conflict for them both.
Show Spoiler
Dina even finds out that Scott’s been injured because she’s become his emergency contact. After three weeks. Woah, kids, slow your horses!
With these caveats aside, the fallish charm of Best Hex Ever bewitched me just enough to give it a C-. There’s enough promise here to save it from a lower grade, but I hope the next book avoids some of these pitfalls.