Note that I listened to this book via Audible instead of reading it, but I'm linking the paperback because I can't review the audiobook. If you purchase this book through the link, you are supporting WdC.

This paperback is 212 pages and is rated 4.2 stars on Amazon. However, the audiobook is rated 4.7 stars on Audible and is 5 hours and 51 minutes. I don't know the reason for the large difference in the ratings, but I enjoyed the audiobook.

This is book 5 of 6 in The Wicked Witches of the Midwest Fantasy Series and book 23 of 32 (soon to be 33) in the chronological order of The Wicked Witches of the Midwest universe which includes The Wicked Witches of the Midwest Mystery Series and a number of short stories as well. There are an additional 8 stories for this universe that, according to Amanda M. Lee's author page, can be read at any time. There are also 9 stories that are crossovers with her other series.

Of the 5 I've listened to so far, I think this is my favorite. Partly, I don't find her writing as annoying as I did in the 1st book. She seems to have a lot fewer 'so and so said' bits in there which annoyed me in the first book because it is written in 1st person POV, so the speaker would be in that character's voice, but then the dialogue tag would be in the narrator character's voice and it was a lot of switching back and forth. I admit that I was impressed with the Audible narrator's ability to switch voices so much, but it annoyed me that it was written in that way. Future books seem to trust the Audible narrator (and possibly the reader if the book is the exact same in print) to be able to figure out who is speaking. I appreciate this.

In this book, two of the nieces, Bay (the narrator) and Thistle decide to curse their Aunt Tillie with the feeling of ants in her pants for all the things she's done to them recently (in the previous books). They also think she watches too many soap operas and enjoys them too much. As is typical for Aunt Tillie, she decides to teach them a lesson, though this time their suffering seems to be a bit more for her personal amusement than for their lesson-learning.

Aunt Tillie curses all 3 of her nieces and their boyfriends into soap opera life complete with all the drama--drinks thrown, surprise pregnancies, interrupted weddings, and all. They struggle with navigating this world, especially Bay's boyfriend, FBI agent, Landon. He continues to question how things could possibly be the way they are as they make no sense such as a person who wasn't pregnant a few minutes ago suddenly being clearly pregnant. The answer the girls gave was always, "It's a soap opera."

People who enjoy or enjoy making fun of soap operas. People who like non-political satire. People who enjoy fantasy.

I am glad they finally had a little more spell casting discussed in here, but it's still pretty minimal. Aside from Thistle casting an ants-in-her-pants feeling spell on her Aunt Tillie and Aunt Tillie casting a spell for them to have to live out a soap opera, there's not much spell casting.

But when Bay was attacked by a polar bear, the book did at least say she thought about trying to cast a spell, but couldn't think of what to cast before the bear was upon her. Okay, that's legitimate. Most of the time there's no reference to casting spells in times that I would think it would be normal to do so such as to repair a broken item or to clear a snowy driveway or other chores. It's possible the reason for a lack of doing this is discussed in one of The Wicked Witches of the Midwest Mystery Series books, but it's not been addressed in The Wicked Witches of the Midwest Fantasy Series.

I also liked the references to various storylines in real life soap operas and how they played out there to help the characters in the book navigate the soap opera stories they were living out in the book.

This is the best book of the series, IMO, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend the series. You could conceivably read this book without reading the rest of the series, but I think having read the rest of the series makes this book more enjoyable. Thus, I like this book, but don't necessarily recommend the whole series. Though it may be more for a young adult fantasy fiction crowd. I don't care much for young adult and while the characters aren't as young as most young adult writing, they writing style does seem more "young adult," so fans of that genre may enjoy this series more than I do.

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Created Apr 30, 2022 at 10:07pm • Submit your own review...