Book Review | Witch You Would by Lia Amador

Sep 4

If you’re thinking about checking out Witch You Would yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about Witch You Would.

Book Cover: *Witch You Would* by Lia Amador

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for Witch You Would:

Explicit intimacy.
Grief.
Mentions of Stalking.
Violence.

Quick Synopsis

Witch You Would takes a world of witchcraft and brings it to the TV screen, putting our characters—Penelope and Gil—up against several others in a Cupcake Wars-style magic-off. There are just a few things in the way of them winning the big prize at the end, starting with their team work and ending with a strange series of events on the set of the show.

Throughout the story, both Penelope and Gil struggle with concepts like identity, self-worth, and what it means to love another person. I really appreciated this book’s insight into career progression and how the quest for virality can affect the quality of content online.

If you’re looking for a fun witch-y read with an interesting twist, I would definitely recommend Witch You Would.

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.

I gave Witch You Would a four-star rating because I enjoyed it and would recommend it to a friend, but I wouldn’t read it again. My favorite thing about this book is how unique it was—I really enjoyed the premise and thought the book did a great job of following through on it.

Additionally, I loved the magic system (though I didn’t really have a clue what was going on) and thought it gave the book a very chaotic and real feeling during the competition scenes. If you’re a fan of cooking competitions (or those pumpkin carving shows, or anything else like this) you may really like this book, too.

My Recommendations

If you enjoyed Witch You Would and you’re looking for more witchy romance books to read next, here are some of my suggestions:

Witch of Wild Things by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Witch of Wild Things is another magical romance that centers around Sage Flores—a woman with the ability to communicate with plants. She’s thrust into a job with Tennessee Reyes, the cute boy who broke her heart in high school. Unfortunately for her, he’s gone from cute to handsome, and she has to juggle her returning feelings for him with her complex family dynamic, the horticultural task at hand, and visits from her dead sister.

Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper

If you want something a little more sapphic, check out Payback’s a Witch. Not only is the romance great, but this one also has a strong competition theme, with a spellcasting tournament requiring Emmy to prove her magical prowess against the heir to the most powerful magical family in town. This one also has a much stronger autumnal vibe than Witch You Would.

Impractical Magic by Emily Grimoire

And finally, there’s Impractical Magic, which has a strong autumnal theme like Payback’s a Witch. It’s all about the town of Oak Haven, in which witches have magic, and anyone but those witches can’t leave the town for long without forgetting all about it—that is, until something starts to go wrong with the town’s source of magic, and it turns out there might be some people who remember the town, after all.

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think Witch You Would sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

Witch You Would starts with Penelope working her dead-end job at a magical supply store. Her boss is awful, and the only thing that brings her joy is the emails sent between her and one of her customers, Gil Contreras. Although Penelope has never met him in person, she’s looked him up, and knows he’s handsome, but is too shy to ask him out.

Her dream is to make everyone of her grandmother’s spell recipes, but it’s hard for her to do that when working in the shop all the time. This is why she’s signed up for the show Cast Judgement, a magical competition. This is a celebrity season, in which the contestants will pair up with famous spellcasters. If she wins, she’ll get a spot at a magic studio, where she can work through her grandmother’s recipes and even make some of her own.

The stakes are raised even higher when her boss at the shop changes her mind about the two weeks of vacation she’d allowed Penelope. She’s given a simple ultimatum—either she’ll be at work, or she’ll lose her job. So Penelope goes on the show, knowing she won’t have a steady paycheck waiting for her at the end of it.

But when she arrives at the show, her hopes of winning are dashed the moment she realizes who her partner is—online magic-casting comedian Leandro Presto, who always messes up his spells in a way Penelope does not find charming.

Leandro Presto has his own stuff to deal with. First, Leandro Presto isn’t his real name. His real name is Gil, and unlike his internet persona would have you believing, he isn’t actually super thrilled being goofy on camera—he would much rather talk about the specifics of spell casting, which he does when emailing with the cute shop girl, whom he’s been too shy to ask out. (And who he recognizes as the girl he’s working with on this show, but she doesn’t know it’s him, because he wears a thick mustache when he’s playing the part of Leandro Presto.)

And second, Gil is there because his grandpa’s organization—which teaches spell casting for free—desperately needs some funds. Gil wants to win, and maybe also find a more consistent role for himself in Hollywood in the process.

As the competition gets under way, Penelope and Gil clash, but they also have great chemistry, which the show runners want to capitalize on. They’re encouraged to fake a fun and happy relationship, which grows more real as the show progresses. The showrunner sucks almost as much as Penelope’s boss, and asks the two of them to lean into the relationship for the cameras, adding just a touch of “fake dating” to the story.

The two of them accidentally match outfits each day, and they make up a secret handshake to do on the show. Things are going great between them, with a few exceptions.

Penelope has some leftover trauma from hurting her grandmother with a spell, and Gil keeps “accidentally” setting things off to entertain the viewers at home. This makes things rough between them until Penelope explains why this is a problem for her, and he adjusts his approach to make things a bit safer.

The competition comes to the first round, and Gil and Penelope’s spell doesn’t wow the judges like they’d hoped it would. The only reason they’re able to stay in the competition is because one of the other teams has a spell that completely failed, sending them home automatically.

After the first round, on a trip to a botanical garden, Gil and Penelope sneak off into a different section and end up having one of those accidental fall kisses. They decide they’re going to talk about it later.

During the second competition, Penelope realizes another team—Charlotte and Felicia—has taken all the tarragon. She goes to their table to ask for some, but Felicia is rude and tells her it’s too bad—she’ll have to use something else.

A little later, Felicia brings the tarragon over to Gil and Penelope. Because of what happened with her grandmother, Penelope is in the habit of checking and double checking ingredients, and this is how she identifies the herb as thyme, rather than tarragon.

Production is shut down while they go through all the ingredients again, and while they’re back at the hotel waiting it out, Gil and Penelope talk over a plan to be extra careful the next day, and they end up broaching the topic of the kiss. But before they can, Charlotte and Felicia come along, forcing Gil and Penelope to hide so they can eavesdrop on them.

But Gil and Penelope—scrunched together in the casting room—start kissing, not even realizing when the women leave until the automatic lights turn off.

The next day, when filming resumes, she and Gil are working on their spell when one jar tips over, ruining some of their progress. Penelope assumes that it’s Gil, still making purposeful mistakes even though she asked him not to.

They have to work together to make up the time, and once again their spell doesn’t perform the way it should. When another team’s spell goes up in flames, Penelope and Gil are once again saved by not being the worst.

Later, Penelope apologizes for blaming him and they talk about what’s been going on between them. Penelope admits that she’s been emailing another guy, but that she would like to keep hanging out with Leandro anyway. This is when Gil decides he’s going to tell her the truth—that he’s both people—but he’s called away by the showrunner’s assistant.

The showrunner offers Gil a spot on a TV show, but tells him he’d have to be single to do it. Then Gil takes off his mustache and meets up with the members of his crew. Unfortunately for him, Penelope sees him and realizes that he and Gil are the same person.

Gil follows her out, and this is when everything is laid bare between them, with both of them admitting that they like each other. After this, both of them experience some shady stuff with the show—someone offers Gil money for his charity if he agrees to throw the competition, and Charlotte offers Penelope a job if she does the same.

Back on set, there’s more trouble—another group has a problem with their spell. Gil and Penelope have a miscommunication in which Penelope thinks he’s dumping her, but he’s not. They make up, then catch one of the judges as the culprit for sabotaging the games, all because she was going to be taken off the show.

Gil and Penelope don’t end up winning the competition, but Penelope gets another job and can work in spell casting rooms. She also spends time working with kids through Gil’s grandfather’s organization.

The book ends with Gil and Penelope happy together, and Penelope’s sister, Emelia, showing up on her doorstep—a precursor to what feels like a second book.

Deep Dive

Now that you know what happens in this book, let’s get into some of my thoughts and opinions.

Praise

My favorite thing about this book was the originality—to take a concept like magic and combine it with the structure of a game show was very unique, and automatically gave the book a lot of points, especially because it managed to execute on that part of the story so well.

Gil is a complex character, and while there are elements of the Gil/Leandro thing that I liked, I think this kind of plot just isn’t my personal preference. Although I do think that, compared to other stories that do the “in love with the person in two different ways” thing, this one did a good job of resolving it without turning it into this big, dramatic thing.

Usually I’m a fan of just getting one perspective on things, but I have to say that I actually did enjoy hearing from Gil. His voice felt distinct, and seeing from his point of view helped me to better understand his character.

Both have good backstories as well, with Penelope experiencing triggers of the accident, and Gil trying to balance his character with his goals.

While I appreciate the book’s effort to be diverse, there were some moments I felt it was clunky and kind of on-the-nose. There’s a scene in which one of our characters, Quentin, says something like “My husband and I haven’t spent this long apart since my top surgery,” and Penelope takes a moment to think “trans man!” Again, I appreciate the inclusion, but think this could have been done a little more subtly, especially because Quentin isn’t a huge part of the story.

This is a perfectly cute witchy book with a very unique twist. My only caveat to this is that I wouldn’t really recommend this as an autumn witch book, just because the vibes aren’t really there for that.

All in all, I really liked this one. If you’re a fan of light-hearted magic and goofy protagonists, you might, too.

These area some books I may read next:

At Last by Marisa Silver

Lady Like by Mackenzi Lee
Gil Next Door by Rachel Meredith
Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela
The Austen Affair by Madeline Bell

Deion Malloy