This Witchy Read is a Wild Ride from Start to Finish

If you are a fan of morally gray characters, then this book is absolutely for you. Before reading this book, I was generally fine with morally gray characters but I didn’t fully grasp the appeal until I read this book. It has some truly excellent character building and arcs, though maybe they’re more like character roller coasters than arcs.

This book takes place in summer 2023 (with a lot of flashbacks) in the Washington, D.C., area. About 20 years prior, witchers went public with their existence and have been trying to integrate with nonmagical people as their full selves. Witchers are people who can work magic and there is a lot of witcher-hatred and oppression. They are only allowed to shop in certain stores and they have to deal with police brutality as well as hate groups. Different witchers can do different things and our protagonist, Venus, brews potions — specifically love potions. Brewers can only brew one type of potion and her family brews love potions for all types of love, including but not limited to romantic love: love potions to make children accept their estranged parents, for example, and love potions to make someone love the idea of something. The list is long and this book imagines myriad ways how such love potions could be weaponized.

Making the potions comes at a physical cost and if Venus doesn’t have a full well of magic within her, she can die from making a strong potion. It’s an incredibly brutal process with bones breaking, vomiting, bruising, or bleeding from even making a common potion. Making illegal potions is how money is made to take care of the family and her mother had given up her own magic for reasons unknown to Venus, so now all the potion-making falls onto her. To make things even more complicated, Venus has a monster living inside of her that craves violence so while she is fighting to do the work that sustains her family, she also needs to keep this thing possessing her in check.

Reading this book was like falling through a series of trap doors with just enough time to stand up between events, brush yourself off, and then the floor drops out from under you again. I loved it. As the story builds, I found myself saying every chapter, “I did not see that coming.”

Content warnings for a lot of violence, deaths of parents and children, identity-based hate, and police brutality. There is more complete rundown of content warnings at the beginning of the book.