Thanks NetGalley and Kensington Books for this eARC of A Letter to Three Witches by Elizabeth Bass.

Synopsis:

Nearly a century ago, Gwen Engel’s great-great-grandfather cast a spell with catastrophic side-effects. As a result, the Grand Council of Witches forbade his descendants from practicing witchcraft. The Council even planted anonymous snitches called Watchers in the community to report any errant spellcasting…
 
Yet magic may still be alive and not so well in Zenobia. Gwen and her cousins, Trudy and Milo, receive a letter from Gwen’s adopted sister, Tannith, informing them that she’s bewitched one of their partners and will run away with him at the end of the week. While Gwen frets about whether to trust her scientist boyfriend, currently out of town on a beetle-studying trip, she’s worried that local grad student Jeremy is secretly a Watcher doing his own research.
 
Cousin Trudy is so stressed that she accidentally enchants her cupcakes, creating havoc among her bakery customers—and in her marriage. Perhaps it’s time the family took back control and figured out how to harness their powers. How else can Gwen decide whether her growing feelings for Jeremy are real—or the result of too many of Trudy’s cupcakes?

Review:

This was a cute book focusing on family, love, and a little bit of witchcraft. Our book switches between the perspective of Griz, a black cat familiar to our antagonist Tannith, and Gwen, Tannith’s cousin and recipient of one of the three letters. The letters are sent to Gwen, our protagonist, Trudy, and Milo. Tannith is up to no good, promising that by the end of the week she is going to abscond with one of her cousin’s partners. From here, Gwen is shaken trying to figure out if her beau Daniel is the wayward man or if she should be more worried about one of her cousin’s men.

As the week unravels we learn more about Gwen and her witchy family……and how they’ve been banned from doing witchcraft. Soon it is clear that at least one of the cousins is practicing magic and strange things are happening in the college town of Zenobia.

I thought this was a cute book, though my ARC had some grammatical errors and the chapters didn’t line up with the pages sometimes. I expect this is just an editing issue and should be solved before final publication. There could have been more character development for Gwen, it seemed like she just instantly fell in love with whatever pretty man was paying attention to her. For a character that was supposed to be 29 she seemed very naïve and like she never questioned anything in her life. Trudy was honestly the stand out cousin for me. She really took charge of her life and the challenges she was facing both magically and personally.

The cat having his own perspective throughout the book was very cute. It isn’t often you come across a book where one of the main characters is a cat! I loved how the cat described their relationship to Tannith and how they wanted more. I will say this book did have a lot of tropes in it between the insta-love plotline and the wicked stepsister, it was a little unoriginal. All in all it was a cute quick read, something to curl up by the fire with as the weather turns to a nice crisp fall.

I would love to read a sequel of this novel and would like to see more character growth as well as chapters from our nonmagical characters.

I give it 3.5 stars.