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:

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.

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.