Review: No Witches But Lots of Magic
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 22, 2014
Although this book is not labelled as such, I got the impression it was aimed at a young adult audience. Not because the writing was particularly simplistic, it was charming and flowed well with some well thought out introspection. What made me feel this was the ‘niceness’ of everything and no one caused her any real anguish - even the visiting sociopath was nice and non-threatening when he turned up at Emily’s door.The cottage was nice, her relationship with her adopted daughter was nice and even the child’s behaviour didn’t attract any obvious discipline on Emily’s part.  The, ‘I must tell her not to open the front door to strangers’ passes as an unspoken thought instead of the semi-hysterical barrage it would have been in real life. The bad guy wasn’t very bad, the unsuitable boyfriend faded away into the background when confronted with past crimes, and the good guy, was, well nice.I liked the main character though, Emily was unconventional bookish woman with a unique taste in clothes and hairdressing devoted to her adopted daughter.  Mia too was charming, and exhibited some delightful character traits which to any experienced mother would send alarm bells ringing to curb them before she hit adolescence – but then Emily will learn like we all do – the hard way!A gentle, and quite short story for a quiet evening by the fire with a hot chocolate to hand. Perhaps too short, I would have liked it to be longer with more character development and maybe a shock or two.