Hex Education

July 31, 2023
Kilmer (Suburban Hell) enchants with this cozy fantasy novel that follows a disbanded coven who reunite to prevent magic from upending their lives. Sarah, Alicia, and Katrina were college freshman who, while casting a spell to shape their futures, accidentally burned down their dorm. Katrina desired fortune, Alicia wanted fame, and Sarah conjured a loving family. Twenty years later, Sarah is married with two children and only uses magic for mundane tasks, such as cleaning her house and crafting spells to ward off raccoons. She’s invited to a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the dorm fire, and though she has no desire to attend due to guilt-fueled anxiety, she agrees to go in support of her sister-in-law Nancy, who was badly injured in the blaze. Once there, Sarah sees Katrina, the owner of a successful biotech startup, and Alicia, a famous magician, for the first time in two decades. With a reporter seeking to uncover the truth behind the fire, the coven fears losing everything if their secrets are exposed. Despite a lackluster mystery involving the circumstances of the conflagration that reveals itself late in the story, the magical hijinks, pop culture references, and colorful cast (including a sassy talking cat) are sure to entertain. Fans of contemporary fantasy will find much to appreciate.

July 28, 2023
Suburban mom and realtor Sarah Nelson leads a pretty normal life, running errands, helping her clients, and caring for her doctor husband and twin teenage children. What no one knows, though, is that Sarah is a witch. She uses her abilities in minor, mundane ways, making lunch meat appear in the refrigerator when she's forgotten to go grocery shopping and talking with the family cat, Katy Purry. However, in college, Sarah attempted to tap more deeply into her abilities, pooling her magic with two other witches with disastrous results--a dorm fire resulting in an innocent bystander being severely burned. Now, 20 years later, Sarah is reunited with those 2 friends, and their attempt to rectify past mistakes unleashes magic more powerful than they could ever imagine. Suddenly Sarah finds it increasingly difficult to hide her abilities from those around her and fears that all her secrets are about to come to light. This amusing, if unremarkable, tale of magic gone awry is a solid choice for collections where stories of modern-day witches are popular.

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October 15, 2023
Kilmer returns to suburbia in this white-collar tale of magic, mayhem, and sisterhood. Twenty years ago, on an otherwise peaceful evening in September, the Hawthorne Hall dormitory at North Valley University burned to the ground. The cause of the fire was never determined, but Sarah Nelson and her best friends, Katrina Andrews and Alicia Lipschitz, know the truth: Their inexperienced, currently estranged coven was responsible for the damage done that fateful night. Now a luxury realtor with a handsome husband, charming twins, and an opinionated, four-legged familiar who enjoys binge watching pay-per-view movies, Sarah still dabbles in magic from time to time. Who wouldn't want a little extra help cleaning the house or keeping raccoons out of the trash? But when an unexpected reunion makes the friends' innate magical abilities go haywire and, to make matters worse, a true crime podcaster starts investigating the cause of the fire, Sarah, Katrina, and Alicia are forced to reconcile with their powers before more irreparable damage is done. At its core, this novel is a love letter to the witchy stories that have come before it. Readers will appreciate the inspiration that Kilmer has taken from The Craft, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and even Charmed as Sarah and her coven navigate keeping their secret safe, protecting their families, and dealing with the often unexpected side effects of magic. Unfortunately, nostalgia isn't enough to propel this story forward, and this falls short of Kilmer's campy debut novel, Suburban Hell (2022). Sarah's domestic use of magic in her day-to-day life is delightful--a scene in which her refrigerator stocks itself with 30 pounds of sandwich meat of its own accord is laugh-out-loud funny--but it's dragged down by an underdeveloped plot and two-dimensional characters. A lighthearted witchy romp that pays homage to its predecessors but is cursed by uneven pacing.

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