Note: I won this novella as part of a contest on the lovely Danielle E. Shipley’s blog — not only did I get a signed copy of the novella, I also got some truly excellent artwork based on the novella, done by the author herself! Thanks so much, Danielle!!!
The Book
The Seventh Spell (Book 3 of the Wilderhark Tales)
The Genre
Fantasy / Fairy tale Novella
The Author
The Plot
A witch’s attempt to cast one spell too many casts everyone touched by her previous spells into chaos. Scattered throughout each other’s pasts, Sula and Edgwyn, Villem and Rosalba, and the rest of the magic’s affected have a single chance to break this last enchant- ment before their “happily-ever-after”-s cease to have ever been.
The Review
I really enjoyed this fairy tale! I’ve read the second book in the Wilderhark Tales series, so it was really fun to see many of the same characters in this story — not to mention some new and intriguing faces! I loved the concept of the seventh spell re-setting all the witch’s prior spells and having all the characters revert to their pre-happily-ever-after states. It was such a fun twist, and something you don’t come across a lot in fantasy series. The writing itself is charming, and there are lots of unexpectedly funny laugh-out-loud lines.
I was also a huge fan of the storyline between the enchanted harp princess and the wandering minstrel — which is great, because I’m pretty sure the next Wilderhark Tale is about them! Speaking of the characters, I’d suggest reading the other Wilderhark Tales before you read this one — having missed the first one myself (soon to be corrected!), I felt I was missing a couple of important story elements, although the author does a great job of filling in the gaps for those of us who may not have had a chance to read all the prior books in the series.
A quick, cute, romantic read — check it out!
The Rating
Five out of five stars
Links:
Check out the novella on Goodreads
Unrelated media of the day:
I may have shared this already, but it’s tons of fun, so why not give it another shot?
It’s “Akinator, the Web Genius”, which is basically a website that plays 20 questions with you to guess which person/character you’re thinking of. I’ve played it a bunch, and it’s fairly alarming how quickly it can guess some extremely esoteric characters.
Michelle Proulx - Author 
Not really on topic, but when I clicked on the akinator link my antivirus sounded the alarms as the site tried to install a trojan horse on my computer. You might want to run a thorough virus and malware scan on your computer as well. The Avast antivirus blog confirms that the akinator site is infected: http://blog.avast.com/2014/01/13/how-to-clean-your-hacked-openx-server/ (I won’t be offended if you delete this comment – doesn’t really belong here after all. I just wanted you to know your machine might be infected.)
Thanks-a-mil for taking the time to review, Michelle! I’m very glad you enjoyed the book. Not much longer ’til you can enjoy Book 4, too! (Less than 2 weeks ’til launch!)
No problemo 🙂 Yay Book 4!!!!!!!!!