Extra Witchy (Fix-It Witches, #3) by Ann Aguirre Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, paranormal romance, romantic comedy
Series: Fix-It Witches #3
Pages: 368
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on October 4, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
After two failed marriages, Leanne Vanderpol is here for a good time, not for a long time. She only loves the witches in her coven, and she cares more about her career than happily ever after. A difficult past makes her skittish, and she doesn't trust relationships to stick. But when she decides to run for city council instead of wasting her talents cleaning up messes for the mayor's office, she fears her past could be used against her.
Unless she can find the right husband to shore up her political career...
Trevor Montgomery might have peaked in high school. He was popular then, and in college as well, but he partied away his future, met the wrong person, and everything fell apart. Now he's jobless, dateless, and hopeless, at least according to his toxic family. Then a chance meeting with the redhead of his dreams offers an unexpected ray of light just when he needs it most.
Can a woman who doesn't believe in forever find true love with a man who's stopped believing in anything at all?
The third in an adorable witchy rom-com series by New York Times bestselling author Ann Aguirre, perfect for fans of:The bonds of sisterhoodA career-driven heroine who thinks she isn't marriage materialA pan hero who struggles with depressionAnd a shocking family secret
My Review:
I picked this up because this is the third book in the Fix-It Witches series and in spite of my very mixed reaction to the first two books, Witch Please and Boss Witch, I was determined to finish the series. Even if I had to rage read my way through this final book.
Which I pretty much did. At least right up until the halfway point – when it got better. And kept on getting better from there until the end.
But that first 50% was one hell of a slog.
First, there’s the pattern of the series as a whole, in that the second book in the Fix-It Witches series, Boss Witch, picked up the action in the middle of Witch Please and re-told the second half of THAT story from a new perspective. Which means that the action of this third book in the series begins in the middle of the second book and proceeds to tell some of that same story from yet another point of view – and in considerably more detail.
To make that part of the long story short, this is not a series where you really need to worry about not having read the previous books, because you will read at least half the previous book before you learn if anything truly new happens in the one you have in hand.
What made the first half of this one particularly hard to get through were the parts of Boss Witch that got repeated. We already know that Leanne Vanderpol seemed to have married Trevor Montgomery totally out of the blue because we see that event from an outside perspective in the earlier book.
But the deets…well the deets are a bit of a hot mess and so are both Leanne and Trevor. Trevor is Titus the Cinnaman’s best friend, so we met him back in Witch Please. From the outside, it seems like 30-something Trevor hasn’t figured out what he wants to do when he grows up. That would be the kind explanation.
The unkind description would be that he hasn’t grown up, and that his life resembles that of Shaggy (Scooby-Doo’s human) a bit too much. That’s certainly what his parents would say, when the truth is that Trevor has been sunk in a clinical depression for a long time and doesn’t see much of a way out even though he really would like to find one.
Which is where Leanne enters his life.
Leanne is a doormat with ambitions. She doesn’t mean to be a doormat, but she is the person everyone relies on to take care of things she shouldn’t have to take care of because that’s pretty much how her flighty, witchy mother raised her. Or truthfully didn’t raise her but left her to raise herself. Her boss, the city manager, is dumping on her and her irresponsible mother has just arrived in town and Leanne is having a bit of a meltdown because she can’t let herself let out all the crap she’s holding in.
Neither Leanne nor Trevor remotely have their shit together – no matter how much it seems like Leanne does on the surface. The first half of the story sinks under the weight of their collective inability to figure out what to do with their lives to a degree that might have worked well in their 20s but not when both are in their mid-30s.
When they get together anyway, the story doesn’t merely pick itself up. It actually starts to shine way more than I was expecting by that point. Separately, they are each a mess. Together, they make each other strong in their broken places.
Enough for both of them to finally start getting their own acts together. They just have to get out of their own ways to realize that not only have they caught feelings for each other – but that they deserve the happiness and fulfillment that comes with them.
Escape Rating B-: The rating is considerably higher than I thought it was going to be in the first half of the book. Their romantic comedy-esque marriage of convenience starts out as plenty convenient but not remotely comedy. They are both way too messed up for that.
But giving each other a truly secure foundation, something neither of them has ever had, is the making of both of them in a way that was rather delightful and completely unexpected – even if they did connect so quickly that I wondered if their insta-love was at least partly fueled by some kind of witchcraft.
Still, the second half of this one had a lightness and a verve and a witchy spark that was missing in the first half, and Leanne and Trevor turned out to be a couple whose whole was literally greater than the sum of their original parts. So I’m glad I made myself finish, but I don’t think I’ll be coming back to this witchy Midwestern town even if the series continues.
