4.16.2025 | Wednesday

The Modern Girl’s Guide to Magic

Item: The Modern Girl's Guide to Magic
Rating: 4.5
Author: Kim

category: Book Reviews
tag(s): adult
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title: The Modern Girl's Guide to Magic
author: Linsey Hall
series: Charming Cove #1
published: 6.2.2023
publisher: Bonnie Doon Press
genre(s): cozy mystery, paranormal, romance
pages: 314
source: bought
format: eBook
buy/shelve it: Amazon | B&N | BookBub | BookHype | StoryGraph | Goodreads
rating:

| series rating:

the blurb

So here's the deal—I'm a magical disaster. A witch from a family of witches, and the only one whose magic blows up in her face. Which is why I came up with my rules...

1. Never get involved with magic
2. If you must get involved, do not enter a competition to win the biggest magical fortune in England
3. And definitely don't fall for Callan Hawthorne, the sexy billionaire mage who you've hated for years

So how the heck do I end up in a situation that promises to break all those rules? It's the only way to save Seaside Spells, my family's magical potion shop.

But it's cool. When I go back home to Charming Cove-a village of ancient pubs and foul-mouthed familiars-I will totally ignore Witch Weekly's Sexiest Man of the Year. I'll win the competition, and if I'm lucky, I won't turn myself into a toad in the process.

This'll be fine. It'll all be fine. Riiiight.

a few notes

POV: 1st person; dual
setting: Charming Cove, England
keywords/phrases: magic, family, discovery, forgiveness
tropes: hero’s journey, unlikely allies, reluctant hero, training sequence, happy ending, damsel in distress
spice: 1/5 🔥
language: 0/5 🤬

public reading: safe
cover notes: so pretty
mood reading: in the mood for a cozy romance with quirky characters and a great story
bonus points: Boris the Badger, a magical familiar!

my review

Aria was cast as the reluctant hero by her grandmother, who convinced her to leave London and come back to the the village to help save the family business via a competition for a vital business within the community. The only problem? It was a task that would involve magic, and Aria’s magic wasn’t exactly stable. It had a habit of bursting out of control at the worst possible moments. Nothing she did helped. In that way, the story is just as much a kind of coming-of-age tale as she comes into her own as a witch. Her nemesis, Callan, is also in town to compete for the same prize. And he’s a mage with strong powers. He’s also a distraction she can’t afford.

I love witchy cozies set in magical small towns, and this fit the bill perfectly. Charming Cove is exactly the kind of place I’d want to live if I lived in a world where it existed! Aria’s character wasn’t created to be perfect, which is a big part of why I loved her. After years of failure with her magic, a childhood of bullying, she’s left with some serious self-esteem issues when it came to her magic. She struggled, and no one was harder on her than she was on herself. And that’s something I think many people can relate to.

And Boris. Boris the Badger… what’s not to love? He was hilarious, usually irreverent, and entirely snarky. But he was also adorable and loyal and utterly supportive of his witch.

I enjoyed the story, but there were a few things I didn’t love.

the damsel in distress trope: Never my favorite trope, especially in more contemporary fiction, there was a bit of this in the story. Not from Aria’s perspective but from Callan’s. It wasn’t huge, but it was there.
the age gap: It’s only four years. That’s not the problem. It’s the initial meeting of our intrepid heroes, when she’s but 17 and he’s 21. It’s obvious even then that he was wildly attracted to her, admitting that he shouldn’t because of her age. Although the age of consent in England is 16, which I looked up, it felt a little weird. I wished she’d been aged up just a little.

About Linsey Hall

Before becoming a writer, Linsey was an archaeologist who studied shipwrecks in all kinds of water, from the tropics to muddy rivers (and she has a distinct preference for one over the other). After a decade of tromping around in search of old bits of stuff, she settled down to start penning her own adventure novels and is freaking delighted that people seem to like them. Since life is better with a little (or a lot of) magic, she writes urban fantasy and paranormal romance.