Review: A Handful of Hexes

A Handful of Hexes by Sarina Dorie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came into this series at book 3, which doesn't seem to have done any harm; there's a good, but not excessive, amount of catch-up provided.

I found the first book entertaining, and felt that this one rose a little higher, showed a stronger grasp of the author's craft in general.

Having said that, there's not, unfortunately, a really strong central plot. The protagonist is trying to achieve a lot of different things: find out more about her mother (who's reviled as a wicked witch even among people who don't have the strongest moral compass); get her fellow teachers to like her; help her students in general, and several of them in particular, to gain the skills and knowledge they need to (literally) survive in the magical world; find out what happened to her vanished ex-boyfriend Derrick; learn magic; and there are a couple of other subsidiary goals, mostly to do with relationships. This does muddy the story, since while she's always pursuing some goal (and not achieving it, though she does make progress sometimes), the goals are so many and various that it almost feels like she doesn't have a clear agenda.

This is how real life is, but fiction sometimes benefits from simplification. Perhaps if the goals meshed more closely, if there were more instances where she was progressing several of them at the same time, it would help.

Setting this aside, the character grows, her tribulations are tense and entertaining, and overall the book worked for me.

(Content warning for a scene in which Clarissa has a sensual interaction with a number of disembodied hands.)

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

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