#1 The Kitchen Witch by Annette Blair

Restarting count with the new year. My goal will again be to read 100 books this year, and if I don't make it, oh well. If I do, yippee! :) So here goes...

My Rating: 5 out of 10 stars

It was okay... a little too "happily ever after" for my usual taste. I found myself constantly berating Melody and Logan for their dense headed-ness in denying their feelings for each other. If they're both too stupid to go for the gusto when it's dumped right in their lap, then they deserve to be miserable! Fortunately, like all romances, both realize their true feelings and all is well.

Was Melody really a Witch? Well, they live in Salem, Massachusetts, and Melody has a cooking show named "The Kitchen Witch", a herb garden in her backyard, a purple front door with bright yellow stars, and a friend Kira who's also a Witch. Plus she has her "spells" and incantations she does during her cooking show. So I suspect she probably is, as her zest for life would seem to indicate.

But Melody's character, were she a true Witch, would've embraced the superficial differences she believed existed between herself and Logan, instead of trying to deny and supress the constant electricity between them. A Witch will go for what they want out of life, bring it into manifestation so to speak. So throughout the book, her actions had me doubting she was anything more than a Witch wanna-be. But there was never enough emphasis placed on any of her magickal workings to truly judge one way or another.

Logan's fear of trusting someone who claims to be a witch, while he himself lives in Salem, is pretty laughable. Is she really a Witch? he keeps asking himself. I don't think being a Witch—which is something I openly admit myself to anyone who asks—has the negative connotation it once had long ago, so I didn't care for Logan's inital aversion to Witches given where he lives (and grew up). Truth be told, it kind of made me like his character less.

I know it probably sounds like I'm being fairly harsh on this book, but I must say that despite all the criticism I gave it above, the story held my interest enough to keep me reading. So for those whom romance is their favorite reading genre, and who maybe aren't as critical as I am with regards to Witchcraft stuff, they might like this book better than I did. As it is, I gave it a 6 because to me, anything less than a 5 would indicate I had to struggle through it and almost didn't finish it, which certainly wasn't the case here. With the sole exception of Melody's denying her feelings for Logan, I admired her zest for life, a characteristic I strongly embrace in myself. Live for the moment!

See the BookCrossing journal page for this book for more reviews and information.