the magic of letting go
When Flair Hardwicke moved back to the small town of Rattleboro, Kansas, where her grandmother had lived, she just wanted to open a bakery and raise her teenaged daughter Lucie in relative peace. But it’s almost Halloween, and there is nothing Rattleboro celebrates like Halloween. The town matron Loretta Oakes wants Flair to participate, now that she’s back in town, but the Halloween celebration has a lot of memories attached for Flair, and she’s not sure that she wants to jump in.
Actually, there is a lot about Rattleboro that holds memories for Flair, and she is struggling. The shop, handed down from her grandmother, still reminds Flair of the times she spent there as a child, and there are still the women coming to the back door not for the teas she had sold but for the tarot card readings she had done in the kitchen. Flair learned to read the cards as a child, but they only brought her pain and heartache, so she stopped. And now Flair turns away all the women who still come to the back door of her bakery, insisting that she has nothing for them.
The front of the store, however, remains empty. Flair bakes and fills the displays with delicious pastries, but no one comes in and shops. Until Flair tries to come up with a treat that can be featured as part of the Halloween trail. She decides on cookies, but she can’t decide how to decorate them. Pumpkins? Black cats? Instead, as she’s still trying to decide whether she’s even going to agree to the Halloween trail, she finds herself coming to and looks around. She made tarot card cookies, decorated beautifully, just like the family tarot cards she’d learned to read as a kid.
Although she doesn’t really know how it had happened, Flair decides to trash all the cookies and refuse to help with the Halloween trail. But instead, her cookies become a huge hit, and suddenly there are customers lined up at her shop. Lucie is excited about working the Halloween trail with her mom and starting to make friends with the girls in her class at school instead of wanting to move back with her dad in St. Louis. Life is finally getting a little easier for Flair.
That is, until her mother shows up with Flair’s ex-husband, and it will take more than tarot card cookies to get things back to the normal that Flair was trying to create for her daughter and herself. In fact, it will take all the magic the town has to set things right for Rattleboro and its future.
Playing the Witch Card is the latest novel from KJ Dell’Antonia, whose Chicken Sisters won her thousands of fans wanting more of her stories. This new novel is about the timeless struggles of mothers and daughters to find the right balance between control and freedom. It’s about the magic we create and when to let go of the spells that turn toxic. It’s about making peace with your past so that it doesn’t keep haunting you as you move into your future.
I really enjoyed Playing the Witch Card. I thought it brought a lot of wisdom and insight into relationships as well as heart and humor. It leans heavily into the idea of witches as the women who create the foundation of a town or a family, but even if you aren’t a fan of witch stories, a lot of the talk of magic also works as a metaphor. If you are a fan of the movie Practical Magic, you’ll find a lot of similarities in this story, and it will remind you to celebrate all the small and ways that magic weaves through our lives and brings happiness, surprises, and love.
Egalleys for Playing the Witch Card were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.
