I really struggled with how to grade this book, mostly because I appreciated what it was trying to do even if I think it did not succeed. I mean, a lot of the ingredients are there: a teenage babysitter’s club that’s actually a coven of witches is a bomb-ass premise, the secondary characters were intriguing, and there were some genuinely funny jokes.
So what’s the problem? The primary issue, craft-wise, was that this was a frankenbook. It is like two different books in totally different YA sub-genres were mashed together, creating a jarring and sometimes troubling experience.
The entire first half of the book is primarily a darkly comic, slow-moving meditation on teenage alienation and trauma in the Midwest. While I laughed a few times, my primary emotions during this part of the book were boredom, annoyance, and mild depression.
I actually thought Williams did a very good job of portraying suburban teens with trauma history and how disorienting and alienating it can be to attend high school with a bunch of people who you believe are “normal” when you feel you are not. Example:
“Everyone else seemed so happy it made my teeth rot.”
As a former Depressed Teen™, OOF. Esme’s mom is living in a long-term care facility for unspecified mental health issues. Esme has a lot of unprocessed grief around this situation which manifests as apathy and self-imposed isolation. Her relationship with her dad is strained and awkward.
Esme’s new friends, Cassandra and Dion, lost their parents early and have been passed from foster home to foster home. Cassandra’s more wild hijinks in the first two-thirds of the book read legibly as a teen who feels abandoned acting out, and the combination of love and resentment between Cassandra and Dion makes sense through the lens of two kids who only have each other being forced into a mutual caretaker relationship because there were no adults to step in.
The unfortunate part of all of this teenage realism is that Esme is…not a very fun protagonist. She’s wildly insecure but also extremely judgmental. This is a real way that teens are but it is not a good time for a reader, and is sometimes downright cringeworthy. One example:
“Upon catching sight of it, Janis practically squealed, ‘Beer pong! I love beer pong.’ That was one of the last things I would have expected to come out of the mouth of an intersectional feminist.”
Arguable misuse of the phrase “intersectional feminist” aside, it’s Peak Insufferable Teen to believe that standing for a set of ideals is incompatible with…fun. Like, we get it, Esme, you are the only person who has ever suffered this way, your whole town sucks except for like two people, adults are weird. I didn’t need 100+ pages of this. An actual teenager who recognized themselves in Esme might have a better time with this first part of the book, but as a former teenager who recognized their teenage self in Esme, I found it almost self-indulgent. I wanted the book to make the point and move on.
The last half of the book is more like a fun, fast-paced action-adventure origin story. (See the issue?) I actually thought the second 50% of the book was enjoyable in a fluffy teen-movie kind of way (more Weird Science than The Outsiders). If the entire book had been like the second half, my grade would have probably been a B or even B+. But because the first half of the book treated the trauma history of Esme, Cassandra, and Dion quite seriously, it was incredibly jarring and upsetting to see it treated so lightly in the second half of the book, especially for one character in particular.
I can’t talk about this without giving some spoilers, so:
Dion turns into a secondary antagonist because he’s been manipulated by his evil father. Once Dion is “defeated” in the prelude to the larger climactic conflict, the girls, and the book, treat him like a joke and an idiot, in a way that seems devoid of empathy. He spends a good portion of the second half of the book locked up in a car trunk with the girls saying mean things about him. With all of the knowledge from the first half of the book about how Cassandra and Dion lost their parents and how it clearly had a huge emotional impact on them, this was really upsetting. Dion was easy for his father to manipulate because he was abandoned, not because he’s an idiot, and to see a traumatized teenager treated quite literally like trash was pretty upsetting for me.
This book also has one other glaring issue, which is that in spite of its diverse cast of characters, it centers White mediocrity. A lot of the people in Esme’s orbit, including her best friend, Janis, her new friend Cassandra, Cassandra’s brother Dion, and her dad’s best friend, Coach Davis, are People of Color/POC, and they are pretty explicitly more interesting than Esme. This left me wondering why Esme, a boring and generic White girl, was both the main character and the eventual leader of the group. It makes the POC in the book seem kind of like…accessories? Which is uncomfortable.
Narratively, it seems like Cassandra should have been the main character. Cassandra is an angry, take-no-prisoners-type badass who wants to use her witch powers to both do good and do bad, so she has some built-in internal conflict right there. Cassandra and Dion move into town when they discover their (presumed dead, RIP) parents deeded them a house. That house is full of stuff that points to a mysterious destiny, including a note from Cassandra’s mom that just says “Dear Cassandra, Find the babysitters. Love, Mom.” Listen. That’s some main-character sh*t right there. Compared to Cassandra, Esme is kind of a soggy noodle. She needs other people to explain what is happening to her for 90% of the book.
I don’t know why Esme was the main character, but because she was, a cool and fun diverse cast ended up reinforcing the idea of a White default. The message seemed to be that, it doesn’t matter how mediocre and uninteresting a White person is; they get to be the center of the story just because they are White. Even if there are far more interesting POC around, they only get to be the sidekick(s). (Pour one out for Janis, Esme’s best friend and one of the only Black teens in town, who basically vanishes from the middle third of the book because she doesn’t have secret witch powers.)
I also had a couple of more superficial concerns. As is a common issue in contemporary-set YA, the “lingo” tries VERY hard to sound teen-like while not sounding teen-like at all.
Example one:
“Janis could be as extra as a side of guac.”
Full-body heave.
Example two:
“I could see that she was mad. Like, rappers-beefing-on-Twitter levels of pissed.”
I have two sixteen-year-old siblings and this book reads like no one under 25 was consulted on the slang.
Another source of slight vexation is that a lot of the references are from the 90s (Think Clueless, Kurt Cobain, etc.). I’m not saying there aren’t quirky teens of today who love stuff from the 90s, but without any within-book exploration of why Esme and Janis were so into this decade in particular it seemed a little strange.
Other concerns: the jacket copy is a little queer-baity. I thought it was hinting at a possible romance between “Instagram-model hot” Cassandra and Esme, but there was not a single explicitly queer character in the entire book. Also, the way Esme’s mom’s condition was eventually framed felt a mite ableist.
I’m not sure there’s a way to execute the trope ‘she’s not crazy, she’s just been cursed!’ in a way that doesn’t trivialize actual mental health conditions, but this ain’t it, chief.
So, with a list of complaints a mile long, what’s good about this book? Part of what made this book so frustrating was that there were so many moments when I almost liked what was happening but I couldn’t quite relax into the narrative, like there was a rock in the shoe that is this book. I think the attempt to interweave a level of teenage wasteland suburban emotional realism into a supernatural comedy was admirable even if the execution did not work. This was a miss, but it was also a big swing.
On another positive note, this book does have some great jokes. There is a running gag that Cassandra and Esme’s supernatural mentor is too busy to help them because he is too absorbed in the day job that is his cover, which had me cackling. The children who are babysat by the babysitting arm of this coven were also hilarious, and clearly based on a lot of real-life experience with small children.
If I had to sum up my reading experience with this book in one word, it would be “bumpy.” The shifting tones and genre conventions created some moments of discomfort, and I found the book’s framing of its diverse cast to leave quite a lot to be desired. However, I did appreciate the jokes, the cleverness of the premise, and the ambitious attempt to bridge very different YA genres.
With all of this taken into consideration, my reaction was a solid “meh.” I’m not sure yet if I will try to continue on with the series, but I will keep an eye out for what’s next from this writer. I think if you feel you need some babysitting teen witch content in your life and you are prepared to overlook some flaws in service of that goal, this book may be for you.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
On the White mediocrity of the protagonist: often a lot of genre protagonists are kind of bland and generic so the reader will have an easy time projecting themselves onto the hero. Think of Harry Potter or Bella Swan from Twilight: decent, mostly-average people introduced to fantastical societies full of eccentrics and badasses and eccentric badasses. The problem is that this book is holding up Whiteness as a default trait that makes for a more relatable character.
Maybe the main character is white because the author herself is white, and there is such incredible backlash for anything that is not #own voices these days—ESPECIALLY in the YA Fantasy world.
If the author had written the main protagonist to be a race she is not, there would definitely be some people (maybe on Goodreads and Twitter) taking issue with it.
So in this case, the author can’t win. If she writes a main protagonist who is the same race as herself, SBTB is going to take issue with that as well?
I think we maybe need to give authors a bit of a break here. If this main character Esme, was boring, or not charismatic that is one thing. But some of the reviews on this site are starting to sound like set ups. Like what exactly are you asking the author to do?
Hey LL. I can’t get in the author’s head, and the author is not the only person who worked on this book, so I’m not going to speculate on author motivations or suggest what she personally “should” have done. But my problem with the book as it is was not the fact that the MC was white. The issue is, as Mrs. Marsh insightfully says above, that having the default “relatable” protagonist be white is a problematic trope we should be questioning. The way this trope falls short becomes very obvious in this book when the boring and “relatable” white person is surrounded by a more interesting and more diverse cast. If Esme were a character with a defined personality other than “I’m just average l’il old me!” there wouldn’t be an issue, because the book would not then center White mediocrity.
I have a feeling that this is one of those books that are are actually geared toward teens. Or, at least, that’s the impression I got based on the review.
It kinda reminded me bout an F/F YA that I ended up DNF’d because the MCs were acting like teens (which, you know, they were). Although it is true that there are many YA titles that are fun to read regardless of the reader’s age, some of them are way more specifically catering to a teen audience. Which is fine.
Other than that, it’s disappointing to hear that the hinted at F/F dynamic was never followed through.
I agree with LL.
It’s also probable that the publisher pushed for a bland central character to build the series around. If there had been a bland central character of color there would be anger about that. The author therefore did what they had to.
I’m nearly done with this book and I only picked it up because of the hinted lesbian romance. Then I thought wait-where is it? Does it exist? Thank you for your review. This book is overall disappointing. I’m 33 but often love YA because there’s actual character development but this book is so flat. Also since I wrote my thesis on Buffy I thought ok, Cassandra is like Faith and she’s far more interesting than Esme(the vampire mom character in Twilight-1 of the worst series in history and I stand by that statement) but I’ll listen to the sequel on audiobook. Thank you library system. Esme is often more annoying than relatable and the first 75% of the book I’ve found boring. Agree with your review. Also when she said intersectional feminist playing beer pong in a judge way I thought wow-your friend can be dynamic but she only has a surface friendship with her.