📚#HalloweenBooks @SueBavey Reviews Legacy Witches by @CassKayWrites for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Sue.

Sue blogs here https://suelbavey.wordpress.com/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Sue has been reading Legacy Witches by Cass Kay.

Legacy Witches is a fun, yet dark story of murderous witches, set in Salem, Massachusetts, a place I have visited on many occasions. Salem is filled with witch-related tourist attractions, but the legacy witches of the title are part of a hidden world – away from the tourism – that reaches back through history to the Salem Witch trials.

Vianna Roots managed to escape this heritage by fleeing to Boston, but now that her mother is dead she must return and deal with her legacy. She has the unusual talent of being able to see ghosts and witnesses the ‘death loop’ of her old best friend Nancy, who must have been murdered in her mother’s house and whose ghost is now stuck there along with the ghosts of Vianna’s ancestors. This mystery niggles at Vianna and she decides to stay on in Salem until she can get to the bottom of it. She has to overcome many hurdles – the house is possessed by the family’s familiar, a demon named Shuck who has yet to accept her, an old school crush, Charles, is determined to woo her but is not exactly what he seems, a HooDoo practitioner wants to force her to sell the house to him and the coven is treating her like an outcast and determined to get rid of her.

Vianna befriends another outcast, a transgender witch named Sandeen and the two of them quickly form a bond. Sandeen was a great character and one of the highlights of the book for me. I also liked Vianna. She was determined not to be bullied by the coven witches into selling them her house or by Charles into dating him when her intuition told her something wasn’t quite right.

Legacy Witches was spooky and action-packed and I enjoyed the mystery thread, a perfect read for October.

Book description

Coming from a long line of murderous witches hasn’t exactly been sunshine and rainbows for Vianna Roots. When she inherits the family’s haunted house after her mother dies, she decides flipping the rundown dump is her smartest move—but the ghosts that haunt her have a different plan.

When Vianna finds the ghost of her childhood friend Nancy, she’s drawn into the mystery surrounding her friend’s death. Her meddling attracts the attention of the oldest coven in Salem. In order to get her out of town, they make an offer on the house, but Vianna hesitates. She’s no longer sure she wants to abandon the demon familiar who possesses her home, the transgender outcast witch—who may just be the best friend she never knew she needed—and her high school crush, who now wants her in his life.

Vianna must find a way to solve the case of her murdered friend, stay out of the hands of the most powerful coven in Salem, and face the past she’s so desperately tried to run away from.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS 

🧙‍♀️’For Fans Of The Macabre And Light #Horror’ @JillianChantal reviews Legacy Witches by @CassKayWrites for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Sherry.

Sherry blogs here https://sherryfowlerchancellor.com/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Sherry has been reading Legacy Witches by Cass Kay.

Vianna Roots is a reluctant witch from a Salem family which has a long history of witchcraft.  She also sees the dead which is not a normal characteristic of a witch. She’s never fit in—either with the town or her family and she had a bad relationship with her mother. As soon as she was able, she escaped in the middle of the night and had no intention of ever returning to her childhood home.

Fate had other plans for Vianna. Her mother died and she had to return home to take part in the burial ritual. But Vianna had other plans than performing the ritual as it is supposed to go. She wanted to tie her mother to the grave so she couldn’t come back and harass her like her other dead relatives—especially her grandmother Susannah.

When Vianna arrives in Salem, she has an accident in her old truck with, of all things, a local policeman.  Then, when she gets to the house she inherited, which she can’t wait to sell off, the house won’t let her in and things continue to go downhill for her from there.

She doesn’t want to wear witch robes to the cemetery and chooses a red dress from her mother’s closet which turns out to be the dress her mother wore when she was initiated into her role as a witch. Something Vianna is determined not to let happen to herself.

At the cemetery, we meet a number of other characters who all have distinct personalities and who do not much care for the rebel Vianna. The scene is set for more drama in her life.

Vianna ties her mother to her grave and once she returns home, she starts to clear out some of the old things lying around. In searching a drawer, she finds a rotting hand. A vision of a woman reliving her death in the bathroom shows her where the hand originated. And now Vianna is on a quest to help this spirit to rest—a spirit she happens to know quite well. But she doesn’t plan to embrace her legacy as a witch. She is going to solve this issue with this spirit and sell the house and leave again as soon as she can.

Along the way to her goal, Vianna goes on a date with a man she had a crush on in high school. She finds, not only is he weird and possessive, but his mother has issues, too. He’s persistent and annoying. She’s mystified about why he’s suddenly attracted to her. Old school mates wreak havoc in her life, and, when danger arises, she even has to head back to the cemetery to dig up another ancestor and get a bone from her—not because she wants to embrace her legacy, but because it’s necessary to do so.

The cemetery caretaker is someone she knew in the past who is not welcome in the witching community either and they strike up a friendship. I loved their relationship. It was nice to have someone that the heroine could rely on and who was a great character. She offered some relief from the gloomy atmosphere and danger the heroine was in.

This book was delightful to read. A lot of great action, a mystery about some paintings and a dead girl in the bathroom as well as the friendship that arises between two people who don’t fit in, makes for a great story. The author also gives us fans of the macabre and light horror a lot of great, descriptive scenes.  This is no white witch, light comedy type story that glosses over some of the darker sides of the craft. I quite enjoyed the change of pace from those type of stories.  

I recommend this one as it is chockful of great scenes, some humor and a compelling story, not least of which is how misfits can find their place and make the home/family they need.

Book description

Coming from a long line of murderous witches hasn’t exactly been sunshine and rainbows for Vianna Roots. When she inherits the family’s haunted house after her mother dies, she decides flipping the rundown dump is her smartest move—but the ghosts that haunt her have a different plan.

When Vianna finds the ghost of her childhood friend Nancy, she’s drawn into the mystery surrounding her friend’s death. Her meddling attracts the attention of the oldest coven in Salem. In order to get her out of town, they make an offer on the house, but Vianna hesitates. She’s no longer sure she wants to abandon the demon familiar who possesses her home, the transgender outcast witch—who may just be the best friend she never knew she needed—and her high school crush, who now wants her in his life.

Vianna must find a way to solve the case of her murdered friend, stay out of the hands of the most powerful coven in Salem, and face the past she’s so desperately tried to run away from.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS (Due out Oct)

📚This Author ‘Dares To Be Different’. @deBieJennifer reviews dark #UrbanFantasy Legacy Witches by @CassKayWrites for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Jenni.

Find out more about her here https://jenniferdebie.com/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Jenni has been reading Legacy Of Witches by Cass Kay.

Legacy Witches by Cass Kay

When Vienna Roots returns home to Salem for her mother’s funeral after a decade away, she expects a short trip. Bury the old witch, sell the family home, try not to let the ghosts of her ancestors or the demon haunting its walls get in the way of the sale, and get back to her life in Boston. No, she does not want to get involved in the tangled, occult politics of her hometown. No, she has no intention of taking over her mother’s place, or practicing her family’s particular brand of brutal magic. No, she doesn’t want to get the police involved. But when Vienna finds a hand in a drawer, and an unexpected specter haunting one of the upstairs bathrooms, she knows this quick trip home isn’t going to be nearly as fast or as simple as she’d hoped.

The market on urban fantasy and witchy protagonists is arguably glutted at the moment. Witches are cutesy, they’re sexy, they’re demon huntresses and vampire lovers and all sorts of fun combinations of back-cover blurb buzzwords, but something that truly sets Cass Kay’s Legacy Witches above the rest for me is that her witches are dark.

Vienna Roots’ ancestors and peers deal in moldering corpses, gruesome deaths, and necromantic rites as a matter of course, and while Vienna herself shies away from the murder edges of magic, Kay seems to revel in the gory details. As something of a connoisseur of gory details, I appreciate the unflinching approach to maggots and skeletons and what a pain in the butt it is to rob a grave on a rainy night.

I appreciate that Kay doesn’t try to redeem the terrible things that the Roots witches have done in the past, and the lengths they will go to to protect their own.

A story of generations, and rewriting the scripts of eras come and gone, Legacy Witches is more than just one more urban fantasy with a witchy protagonist. This is a novel with heart, a story about growth, and acceptance, and magic far darker than most authors in the genre dare dabble in from a writer who obviously knows her craft. In a market that has long been saturated by the cozy, the sexy, and the action-y, and the overly romantic, Legacy Witches dares to be something different, and as a reader, I appreciate that too.

5/5

Book description

Coming from a long line of murderous witches hasn’t exactly been sunshine and rainbows for Vianna Roots. When she inherits the family’s haunted house after her mother dies, she decides flipping the rundown dump is her smartest move—but the ghosts that haunt her have a different plan.

When Vianna finds the ghost of her childhood friend Nancy, she’s drawn into the mystery surrounding her friend’s death. Her meddling attracts the attention of the oldest coven in Salem. In order to get her out of town, they make an offer on the house, but Vianna hesitates. She’s no longer sure she wants to abandon the demon familiar who possesses her home, the transgender outcast witch—who may just be the best friend she never knew she needed—and her high school crush, who now wants her in his life.

Vianna must find a way to solve the case of her murdered friend, stay out of the hands of the most powerful coven in Salem, and face the past she’s so desperately tried to run away from.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS (Due out Oct)