“If my mother dies here…” Allie looked down at Jack’s thin fingers clutching her arm, and braced herself. “…I get to help eat her.” [loc. 6387]
I was a big fan of Huff's 'Blood' series of urban vampire fantasies, but I hadn't read any of her more recent novels, until now. The Enchantment Emporium (which I purchased in 2015, aargh), fitted a reading-group prompt so I decided to give it a try.
The Gale family is strongly matriarchal and mostly female. They have magical gifts (different for men and for women) and it's implied that there's a lot of cousin-marriage to keep the gifts within the family. Most of them seem to be 'enthusiastically nondiscriminating' sexually: the novel opens with protagonist Allie (Alysha) in bed with two cousins, one male and one female. She's moved back home after losing her job and the cousin man she loves, who turned out to be gay. Allie has a lot of aunties -- a more or less formal title for the post-menopausal ladies who run the family -- and it's a relief to get a letter from her grandmother, leaving her the Enchantment Emporium. Nobody really believes that her grandmother is dead, but she's certainly disappeared: when Allie goes off to Calgary, it's as much to investigate that disappearance (and escape her loving but claustrophobic family) as to run the junk shop. Which turns out to be a key element in the city's fey community, as well as a place stuffed with magical artifacts, some more benign than others. (The shop only ever seem to sell yoyos...) Allie employs a leprechaun, encounters a handsome journalist who actually works for a sorcerer, and begins to realise that the shadows passing overhead aren't just birds of prey.
I found the family's charms and powers very confusing at the beginning of the novel, and wasn't much edified by the end (though this is the first in a series). Allie's habit of writing invisible runes ('mine') on the male characters made me a little uncomfortable, too. The aunties were great, and fearsome: cousin Charlie, a world-walker with lurid hair and a gift for music, was probably the most intriguing of Allie's cohort. It was a fun read, very fast-paced, with romantic elements and family interactions, but it didn't hook me: lucky, that, as the series is no longer available for Kindle and seems to be out of print too.
Fulfils the ‘An author with a same name as you’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
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