REVIEW: Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck

In Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck, Every day spent in her beloved hometown is a good day for Emerson Wilde. After all, her family is part of the local history in St. Cyprian, Missouri, as is the indie bookstore she runs since her grandmother’s passing. Add in a healthy dose of civic pride, being the president of the chamber of commerce–*youngest* president ever, thank you–and you have one happy woman. Emerson faces each challenge with a bullet point list of actions to take and a can-do attitude. It’s when her nemesis, the town’s mayor Skip Simon, appears to send supernatural creatures to harm her that Emerson feels the first chink in her armor. And it spirals out of control from there.

“Think of all I’ve done without magic, Zander.” I grin. “Just imagine what I’m going to do with it.”

After Emerson somehow saves her life as well as that of her close friend Jacob North, she finds out that her life for the past decade has been a shadow of what it could have been. Because she’s a witch! After failing a test in her late teens regarding her power as a witch and having her memories wiped, Emerson went about her business day after day not knowing her friends–all witches–were watching out for her. She’s the one who typically comes to the rescue and always tries to be a step ahead of trouble. But now Emerson and her long-time friends are going to have to go head to head with an enemy who has the power to destroy everything they hold dear. Will they have enough power between them to defeat the darkness?

‘Every memory I know is locked away from me is him. It’s been him forever. And it’s funny how accepting that, here and now, feels almost easy. Like the hard part was getting here. Now there’s just Jacob.’

Small Town, Big Magic was a solid start to author duo Hazel Beck’s new Witchlore series–and it promises to give readers an inside view of all the romance, laughs, rivalries, and witchcraft happening in (fictional) St. Cyprian, Missouri.

“Emerson,” my best friend says, squeezing my hands, “you may not have known you were a witch. But you have always been magic.”

Authors Megan Crane & Nicole Helm have a cool premise on their hands with this new series. Writing as Hazel Beck, they’ve created a quirky-cute small town in the Midwest where witches walk among the locals without anyone noticing a thing. And it’s the witches who protect historical St. Cyprian. Well, and our heroine Emerson Wilde, who watched out over her beloved small town every day, never having any idea she herself was a witch.

Emerson was such an interesting character. And a force to be reckoned with. (lol) She was a Type-A personality who loved her planners (plural) and stickers, PowerPoint, and to-do lists. And she was definitely a feminist–but not in a man-bashing way. Emerson believed in the power of women and knew that they should help each other, not hold each other down. That came into play in a big way when she found out she was a witch. Her wonderful friendships with Georgie and Ellowyn took on new meaning as things evolved around her and they were forced to fight against evil threatening their hometown.

There was admittedly a bit of an info dump the first quarter or so of the book. But it set the stage for what took place in St. Cyprian as Emerson, Georgie, Ellowyn, Emerson’s cousin Zander, and local farmer–and Emerson’s love interest–Jacob recaptured their group dynamic. From the sweet romance between Emerson and Jacob, the bickering between Ellowyn and Zander, and the other eccentric characters that charmed the pages, this was an easy read with enough life lessons learned and excitement to keep me intrigued through to the end.

QOTD: Have you read any of Megan Crane or Nicole Helm’s work before?

Book Info:

Publication: Published August 23, 2022 | Graydon House | Witchlore #1

For fans of THE EX HEX and PAYBACK’S A WITCH, a fun, witchy rom-com in which a bookstore owner who is fighting to revitalize a small midwestern town clashes with her rival, the mayor, and uncovers not only a clandestine group that wields a dark magic to control the idyllic river hamlet, but hidden powers she never knew she possessed.

Witches aren’t real. Right?

No one has civic pride quite like Emerson Wilde. As a local indie bookstore owner and youngest-ever Chamber of Commerce president, she’d do anything for her hometown of St. Cyprian, Missouri. After all, Midwest is best! She may be descended from a witch who was hanged in 1692 during the Salem Witch Trials, but there’s no sorcery in doing your best for the town you love.
Or is there?

As she preps Main Street for an annual festival, Emerson notices strange things happening around St. Cyprian. Strange things that culminate in a showdown with her lifelong arch-rival, Mayor Skip Simon. He seems to have sent impossible, paranormal creatures after her. Creatures that Emerson dispatches with ease, though she has no idea how she’s done it. Is Skip Simon…a witch? Is Emerson?

It turns out witches are real, and Emerson is one of them. She failed a coming-of-age test at age eighteen—the only test she’s ever failed!—and now, as an adult, her powers have come roaring back.

But she has little time to explore those powers, or her blossoming relationship with her childhood friend, cranky-yet-gorgeous local farmer Jacob North: an ancient evil has awakened in St. Cyprian, and it’s up to Emerson and her friends—maybe even Emerson herself—to save everything she loves.