Book Review: Boss Witch Puts a Small Town Spin on an Exquisite Romance Trope
After hopping on the Witch, Please train really late last year, I came away with one question: I wonder what happened with Clem and the witch hunter? Fortunately, Boss Witch, the second book in the Fix-It Witches series, was waiting with all the answers I could want, and then some.
When witch hunter Gavin Rhys arrives in the small Midwestern town of St. Claire on assignment from his order, local witch Clem Waterhouse volunteers to be the one to distract him and keep his eye off her coven, no matter what it takes. But what starts as a simple flirtation soon turns much more serious when the two of them realize they’re falling hard and fast for the other while the guilt of the secrets they’re keeping threatens to crush them.
I love a good witch/witch hunter romance. It’s got that air of forbidden love with very elevated stakes. Clem and Gavin have incredible chemistry, both on the steamier side of things, and also in the way they each function as the other’s safe harbour in the midst of the chaos around them. Both feel as if they have to shoulder the burden of other’s expectations and are committed to making as little fuss as possible. The story sees them not only learning to choose and trust each other, but to choose themselves too, and to draw boundaries where necessary. It’s as much a love story as it is a meditation on the toxic turn familial expectations can take.
As a personal side note, I loved Benson the mouse. As someone who owns a little rodent of my own, I found any sequence with him very sweet and endearing and painfully accurate.
The one thing I will caution readers about is this: part of Boss Witch overlaps significantly with Witch, Please. I know this is common for the genre, and it didn’t bother me at all, but I will just give this heads up. If you’re thinking about reading Boss Witch, and haven’t yet had a chance to read Witch, Please, I recommend doing so. By and large, they should function fairly well as independent stories, but the first book does a lot of good worldbuilding set up early on, which is helpful because Boss Witch dives right into the action with very little preamble. That’s not to say it’s devoid of worldbuilding, far from it. Boss Witch actually dives much deeper into this particular system of magic. But it also hits the ground running, so I found it helpful to already know where I was in the world and loosely how things worked. More so than other romance series I’ve read recently, this one felt like a direct sequel to the first book, rather than another story in the same world.
All told, I love the small-town setting with the larger-than-life stakes, and all the delicious top-tier tropes Aguirre mixes into Clem and Gavin’s story. Highly recommend.
Boss Witch is out April 5, 2022. Special thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Casablanca for the advance copy for review purposes.