*Book source ~ A review copy was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Sorceress Ivie McKie is a Kindergarten teacher and, after a bad couple of experiences, has decided to retire from her short-lived foray into the arena of magic. This suits her fiancé, veterinarian Jackson Blake, quite well, but her back-from-the-dead father who wasn’t dead at all, but a dog then a cat, won’t let her just be happy. He’s determined to settle a debt with an archaic practice and he’ll do anything to make sure it happens.
I’m going to start off by saying I loved book 1 in this series, Suddenly Sorceress. It was quirky and funny and quite a fun adventure. Which makes my disappointment in Suddenly Spellbound all the more heartbreaking. Everything I loved in the first book is missing here. The book is well-written, but I can’t get past all of the shitty behavior. Ivie is a Class A moron. She trips along from disaster to disaster with not brain one in her head. Letting her dad rule her life is another thing that irritated me and it’s this daddy thing that leads me to the thing that pissed me off the most.
Ivie’s dad is the one with magic in the family. Because he’s been in animal form for so many years, Ivie makes excuse after excuse after excuse for him every time he does something weird or dangerous. But when he asks her to do a spell and lies about what kind of spell it is and she blindly agrees despite promising Jack she wouldn’t do any more magic, the result is her father and his “apprentice” giving Ivie a magical roofie and magically violating her. They took away her free will with magic (the roofie) and lied the entire fucking book about it. They used magic to manipulate her and even though Ivie knew something wasn’t right, she kept allowing her dad to do shit to her magically. I am so not ok with this. In fact, I almost just stopped right there, but decided I should hang in and see if Ivie rips her dad a new asshole about this shit. Nope. That is NOT what happens. Ivie continually lies to Jack about the shit that’s going on, completely disrespecting him and their relationship, all the while drooling over the “apprentice” all because of the magical roofie. On top of all of this, toward the end, there are more instances of Ivie being a total moron and it ends in a cliffhanger. I will not be reading any more in this series. I’m completely soured on the whole Ivie and Jack relationship now and I wash my hands of them.
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