A Dark and Secret Magic - Wallis Kinney - ★★

AUTHOR: Wallis Kinney

GENRE: Fantasy-Romance.

PUBLICATION DATE: October 8, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: An adult fantasy-romance about a witch who doesn’t know her true power. Lightly inspired by the myth of Persephone and Hades. Good enough ‘magic’, but plenty of ‘secrets’ and not enough ‘dark’. Too much of romance, not enough of fantasy. Gets a bit repetitive, though the ending works for the plot. This is an outlier review.

Plot Preview:

Thirty-one-year old Hecate Goodwin, ‘Kate’ to her close ones, is a hedge witch who, after her mother’s death a few months ago, lives with only her black cat for company in a secluded cottage. She enjoys the solitude sometimes, but her craving for human company makes her spend more time at an apothecary she co-owns.

When her elder sister Miranda asks her to host the annual Halloween gathering for their coven, Kate’s sheltered life turns into chaos. As the date also happens to be Kate’s birthday, she needs to ensure that the gathering lives up to the times when her mother hosted it. To add to the stress, Matthew Cypher, a ‘hexan’ from a rival coven that practices forbidden magic, turns up after many years, asking for sanctuary. As the hedge witch, Kate cannot refuse him this request. To top it all, Kate discovers an old book infused with blood magic in her mother’s room. To whom can Kate go for help? Whom can she trust?

The story comes to us in Kate’s first-person perspective.

Bookish Yays:

🎃 Learnt a lot about hedgewitch magic. Most fantasy books I’ve read with hedgewitches show them in a cosy way, so this take was different and more fun.

🎃 The magical set-up was wonderful, with different witches holding various types of power and different covens having varying power structures. The magic itself was also interesting.

🎃 To those who enjoy Halloween, this book will deliver plenty of pumpkin-spice feels.

🎃 Merlin the black cat – wanted so much more of him!

🎃 This book is said to have “echoes of the classic Hades and Persephone” story, and it does. It isn’t a typical retelling where the relationship between the two is sanitised and romanticised. Rather, the foundation of that connection is used to build the darker aspects of this plot. Though I wanted more of this, I did like the innovative take.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

👻 As a fantasy-romance, the book promised a strong fantastical base. However, most of the scenes seem to be focussed on the romance and the fantasy feels quite diluted in comparison. I picked this up for the fantasy, so this was a bit disappointing.

👻 Great description in the food-related scenes and plenty of recipes at the end. (This might be a Yay to some, but I am not fond of extended descriptions of relatively unimportant points. Why should only food get such extensive picturesque imagery in this plot?)

👻 The world-building is quite vague. The setting seems to be our contemporary time, with the coven members referencing many ideas from our world such as blood cancer and influencers and selfies. However, the world itself feels very hazy, with only the woods that Kate loves to wander in described in an atmospheric way.

👻 Kate’s sisters Miranda and Celeste, Ginny the book witch, and Ginny’s mother Rebecca who co-owns the apothecary with Kate, are all characters with tremendous potential. But they don’t get much page space and there’s no depth to any of their arcs. I would especially have loved to see more of them, especially in terms of how their magic is so different from Kate’s.

Bookish Nays:

👹 The title uses the word ‘dark’, but most of the book feels light and cosy. Then, it suddenly takes a plunge into the dark zone, which is over before the blink of an eye. Anyone who knows fantasy knows that a book cannot strive to be dark and cosy at the same time; they are distinct genres with distinct feels.

👹 Even when there were dark magic scenes, the writing somehow didn’t grip me into full concentration. Everything seemed surface-level, with neither emotions nor characters being explored in depth except to the extent required. At times, it felt like the book was trying too hard to deliver the feels.

👹 Hecate’s character rarely acts her age. I could have put this down to her sheltered upbringing, but the turnaround in her behaviour seems to be equally abrupt, making the earlier naivete questionable. Plus, there is no spark to her personality at all.

👹 Considering that the writing is in first person, we should have got to know and connect with Hecate better. But her thoughts delve on the same 2-3 thoughts throughout the book: “Can I trust XYZ?”, “I don’t trust XYZ”, and ‘I am not good at this.’ Rarely does her mind go into other topics. She left me bored.

👹 Partially thanks to the above, and partially because the entire book has the same kinds of scenes (Hecate uncertain, Matthew reassuring her that she’s fabulous, her sisters looking at them questioningly, and tons of secrets by everyone involved), the plot feels repetitive. There’s no escaping the triad of lies, doubts, and secrets until the final few pages.

👹 On that note, there are way too many secrets in the book. Every single character except for Hecate holds multiple secrets. Needless to say, the secrets always come with their permanent plot partner: miscommunication. This combo was annoying.

👹 The romance seems to begin with the enemies-to-lovers theme but the turnaround in feelings is so immediate that it feels like insta-attraction. Again, two tropes that don’t work in harmony with each other.

👹 The plot development is terribly slack. Hardly anything happens in the initial quarter, and later, what happens is just the slow-ish revelation of secrets and more secrets, until the rushed-up climax.

👹 The climax was terribly disappointing to me. After all that build-up, I can’t believe the settlement was so quick and smooth.

All in all, while this debut work did have some *magical* moments, the over-reliance on secrets and the repetitive conflicts made me zone out of the narrative time and again. With such a title, I expected something genuinely and consistently darker. I enjoy cosy fantasies, but this books feels like a mishmash of dark and cosy while doing justice to neither.

It’s not all bad. I am relieved that the dreaded ‘kitchen sink’ so common in debuts isn’t present in this. It’s just that the book doesn’t deliver what the title and the cover promise. For an adult fantasy, the plot is too tame and the characters too bland.

Maybe this would work better with the YA-NA crowd. (Every ‘censorable’ scene except for kissing is closed door, so it just might.) Do note that I am an outlier in my opinion, so please read other reviews before you take a call.

My thanks to Alcove Press for providing the DRC of “A Dark and Secret Magic” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.