Some Like It Psychic

Everly is standing in an abandoned power plant when Garth, the werewolf who is supposed to be protecting her, blocks the exit and growls at her. Her phone has stopped working. The harmless background feeling she has been following with her new psychic abilities has turned into a full warning. Then Blade Wickham appears, Garth walks over and sits beside him, and Blade scratches him behind the ears and says, “Good dog.” That was the point where I was completely committed to finding out how this mess ended. I am going to discuss what happens after that, including the rescue and one death, so this review absolutely gets into the ending.

The thing I kept coming back to in Some Like It Psychic is competence. Specifically, I loved watching Everly discover that becoming psychic does not mean replacing everything she already knows how to do. She is a divorced mom in her forties whose children have left home, she has quit a paralegal job she hated, and she moves to Queen’s Landing to start over at her great-aunt Loretta’s bed and breakfast. The paranormal part arrives quickly enough. The inn is a sanctuary at a magical crossroads, Loretta has been keeping several facts from her, and Everly’s lifelong “intuition” is actually psychic ability. But what makes Everly useful when things get dangerous is partly magic and partly twenty years of being the person who handles things.

That worked for me.

Her competence is also allowed to fail, which matters. Everly reads Junior Wickham at the summer festival and gets the name Lilith plus the sound of water. Marcelo tells her Lilith is Brian Wickham’s yacht, and everyone decides the kidnapped magical children must be there. They arrive ready for a rescue and find an empty boat. While they are wasting time, Carlos, an eight-year-old werewolf Everly met at the spa, disappears. I liked that mistake because Everly does not get psychic powers on Tuesday and become an expert by Thursday. She gets a real clue and interprets it incorrectly. Later, an ordinary guest at the inn mentions Lilith Lane by the abandoned power plant, and Everly realizes Junior had also mentioned that plant during their conversation.

There is a funny practical point buried in all that magic: having information is not the same thing as knowing what it means. Everly needs other people. Rowan knows the local landscape and witchcraft. Marcelo has the werewolf pack and can recognize scents. Delilah is willing to walk into basically anything. Loretta knows the Crossroads. Even Mr. Barry, whose main contribution until then seems to involve refusing shirts and making Lazarus miserable, supplies the piece everyone missed because he rides his bicycle around town. I liked that the book keeps building the group this way instead of proving Everly is secretly better than everyone.

My favorite relationship is probably Everly and Delilah. There is a lot of joking about bodies, sex, aging, and Marcelo's attractiveness, and occasionally Delilah pushes the matchmaking harder than I needed. Still, their friendship has an ease I believed. Delilah arrives with pizza so Everly does not spend her final night in her old house alone. She stays for the move, accepts vampires and werewolves at almost alarming speed, goes investigating with her, and accidentally shoots Everly in the butt with a magical sleeping dart. The book wisely does not retire that last fact after one joke. Everly brings it up again at breakfast because obviously she does.

I also enjoyed Lazarus far more than I expected. He initially looks like a creepy ninety-year-old bellhop who keeps materializing out of shadows. Then we learn he is a vampire with one fang who is stranded away from the Dark World. He is perpetually irritated by Mr. Barry, the aggressively mundane nudist vacationer, and their running conflict is exactly my kind of stupid. After Lazarus kills Brian Wickham to save Carlos, he returns to the inn covered in blood. Mr. Barry walks in with his towel, takes one look at him, and asks if he needs one. It is a tiny payoff to a joke the book has been setting up for chapters, and it got me.

The larger rescue worked for a related reason. Everly is captured after the Garth betrayal and brought into Wickham's hidden laboratory, where Brian and Junior are holding magical children, experimenting on them, and planning to sell them. Garth's apparent betrayal turns out to be the result of a manipulation spell. Everly then has to work from inside the cells while her friends are outside a magical barrier. She figures out telepathy because she needs it, reaches Delilah and Rowan, encourages Nissa to overload the suppression cuffs electrically, and tricks Junior into opening their cell by having Nissa yell that she has her period and needs supplies.

Is it ridiculous? Extremely. It is also exactly the sort of ridiculous this book had taught me to expect, and I was delighted when Junior returned carrying paper towels.

There are places where the empowerment language gets repeated past the point where I needed it explained. Everly frequently thinks about being strong, putting herself first, embracing her body, no longer accepting other people's expectations, and finally living rather than merely taking care of everyone else. Most of those ideas are already clear from what she does. She sells the house, quits the safe job, refuses Matt's insulting receptionist offer, accepts her psychic abilities, makes new friends, and eventually punches Junior in the face. I did not always need the additional paragraph explaining what those actions represented.

Matt is similarly uncomplicated. He cheats, belittles Everly's career, pressures their son toward law, complains about the teenager behaving like a teenager, and later offers Everly a lower-level job while acting like he is rescuing her. I understand why he exists. Everly needs a very concrete version of the life she has rejected, and his phone call helps crystallize her decision to stay in Queen’s Landing. But the supernatural characters become much more interesting company because Matt barely has enough redeeming material to complicate Everly's anger.

Marcelo could have fallen into the same problem as the designated sexy werewolf. There are a lot of muscles. There are several transformations that leave him naked. Everly spends significant time trying not to stare, and Delilah spends significant time encouraging her to stare more. The attraction is not subtle. What saved it for me was that the book does not immediately make Everly abandon her newly won independence for a relationship. She repeatedly notices Marcelo, enjoys being desired by him, and still says she only just got her freedom and wants to know herself first. By the late porch scene, when Marcelo examines her bruised knuckles after hearing she punched Junior and tells her he finds her appealing inside and out, I was ready for that tenderness.

Queen’s Landing itself is constructed with the same cheerful lack of restraint. There are ley lines, shifting interdimensional doors, storm fae, vampires, werewolves, witches, magical jewelry, potions, an armory hidden behind a library fireplace, enchanted massage chairs, brownies doing housework, and apparently dragons. Usually I want supernatural rules to become reasonably clear, but this is operating more like a town where the answer to “is that real?” is consistently yes. Rowan actually tells them, “Everything is real.” Once I accepted that rule, I stopped asking the book to justify every new creature and enjoyed seeing what turned up next.

I especially liked Rowan. Everly and Delilah hike out expecting an intimidating witch and find a romance writer in pajama bottoms, mismatched socks, and a pencil-filled messy bun who has writer’s block and wants everyone to leave her alone. Everly gets through the door by spontaneously solving a problem in Rowan's romance plot. That introduction tells us more about Rowan than a magical demonstration would. Her later admission that she has isolated herself partly because the Wickhams treated her bloodline and potential children as resources also gives some weight to her reluctance to participate in town politics.

The villains are much broader. Brian wants supernatural power extracted and commodified, while Junior mostly wants money and status. Their laboratory makes the ugliness concrete, especially when Everly sees children lined up behind glass with suppression cuffs burning their wrists. Brian calling them “vessels” rather than people is not nuanced villainy, but the rescue story does not really require nuance from him. When he later grabs Carlos, threatens to inject him with lethal wolfsbane, and insists the child is merchandise promised to a buyer, I was fully fine with Lazarus dropping out of a tree and biting him.

And yes, Lazarus apparently kills Brian. The complication is that afterward nobody can find Brian's body, or Junior, when the plant explodes. Blade is also missing. That is a deliberate series setup rather than a clean ending, and the final discovery makes that even clearer: the stone Everly impulsively took from Junior's pocket is actually a dragon egg. Rowan says it cannot belong in their realm, meaning the Wickhams' operation extends beyond grabbing whoever happens through the Queen's Door. I normally get annoyed when a first book spends its final pages advertising the next problem instead of resolving the current one. Here the kidnapped children are rescued and returned to their families first, so the egg feels like a new question instead of withheld closure.

The last joke also earned its place. Everly, Delilah, Rowan, and Nissa are finally in the Crossroads hot tub when they realize the egg means more work. Everly wants a break. Draumin, Nissa's raven, looks at her and says, “Nevermore.” It is corny. I laughed anyway.

That combination is basically why I recommend Some Like It Psychic. It knows that its world is silly and commits to it, but it does not treat Everly's second chance as a joke. The magical mystery works because she is inexperienced enough to make mistakes and practical enough to keep trying after them. More importantly, her new life does not require becoming twenty-five again. She gets pink nails, psychic powers, new women friends, a werewolf flirting with her, and a vampire who will apparently murder a kidnapper on her behalf. She also still gets tired, misreads clues, worries about her children, and needs help. Queen’s Landing is absurd. Everly feels grounded enough to make me want to go back.

This is a book for particular readers, and I should tell you straight away whether you are one, because otherwise you will waste an evening. I am a retired civil engineer from Leeds, which means I am not the audience this book had in mind when it was written, but I read it anyway, in three sittings, between snooker and the football results. The book is a paranormal romance about a woman in her forties, newly divorced, whose two children have just left home. She moves to her great-aunt's bed and breakfast, discovers she is psychic, and spends the second half of the story trying to rescue kidnapped magical children from a family of commercial witches. If you are a woman of roughly that age, or anyone who has spent twenty years putting other people first, you will probably enjoy it. If you need your plot watertight or your magic system explained, you will grind your teeth. I ground my teeth. I also found myself quietly weeping at a scene as subtle as a brick, which surprised me, because I do not usually cry at books, and this one was not trying to move me. I will discuss the ending, because that is where the book makes its case, so if you want to know nothing past chapter fourteen, stop reading now. The book itself gives the game away by chapter five, so you have been warned twice.

The first chapters are the weakest part. Everly Landry has just sat through her son's graduation, a divorced paralegal surrounded by her mother, her best friend Delilah, and her ex-husband Matt, who behaves exactly as the Bad Ex in these books behaves. He is patronising, sneering, flashy with money he never actually gives her. He offers her a receptionist job at his firm as a favour and frames it as kindness. The book is not subtle about him. That is fine. Subtlety is not what the first fifty pages need. What they need is to establish that Everly has been told her whole life to be sensible and logical and secure, and that she has decided, at last, to be otherwise. Her daughter has graduated, her son is graduating, and she has quit her job to move to Queen's Landing, a small coastal town, to live in a cottage at her great-aunt's bed and breakfast. I was ready to dislike her. I was wrong. The book's central claim is that a woman who has spent two decades as a wife and mother is finally entitled to want things for herself, and that claim is the engine that carries everything else. It is not a novel idea, but it is sincere, and sincerity in this genre is worth more than originality.

The inn is the best thing in the book. The Crossroads Inn, to give it its full name, is a sanctuary for supernatural travellers, a place where anyone who asks for sanctuary must be given a room for the night. It is run by Loretta, Everly's great-aunt, a woman of a certain age with a partner called Jane, a vegetable garden, and a habit of knowing more than she says. I liked her immediately. I also liked Mr. Lazarus, the resident vampire, who wears a bellhop uniform and appears from the shadows at the worst possible moments. These are the characters who give the book its texture. The world itself is set dressing. There are ley lines, wards, iron suppression cuffs, an interdimensional doorway that moves around town, and at no point is any of it explained with a rigour that would satisfy a child of ten. I am the kind of reader who wants to know where the ley lines go and what happens to the vampires when the sun rises. The book does not care, and I have decided that is a fair difference of opinion between us. It is not trying to be the thing I would read it for. It is trying to be warm and funny and kind, and it mostly succeeds.

The romance is with Marcelo, the owner of a bar called the Moonshine, and we meet him on Everly's first night in town. He is the wish-fulfilment male of these stories: broad-shouldered, softly spoken, a werewolf who is also the alpha of the local pack. He sees Everly's appeal when she cannot see it, is gentle with her children and fierce with her enemies, and the book is not shy about comparing him to Matt, the useless ex. It works, as far as it goes. What I noticed, because I notice these things, is that Marcelo also keeps deciding things on her behalf. He tells her the plan, expects her to follow, and is praised for it. The book is committed to the idea of Everly's autonomy, right up until it gives her a scene where she has no choices at all. She gets her agency back, eventually, in the rescue plot, when she makes the plan herself and carries it out. But the balance is not always comfortable. I am not going to pretend I know how romance ought to be written, because I do not. I will say that a book which spends so much time telling you that Everly is free now, finally, keeps putting her in scenes where the important decisions are made for her, and it gets away with it because she is a better character than the plot deserves.

The actual plot is the weakest thing about the book, and honesty requires me to say that, because it matters for the recommendation. Magical children are being kidnapped in Queen's Landing, sold by the Wickham family, a dynasty of witches with very little magic of their own who have built an industrial enterprise on the back of other people's gifts. Everly, Marcelo, Delilah, and a witch called Rowan set out to find them. They are joined by Nissa, a storm fae teenager who escaped the kidnappers, and by a pack of werewolves who patrol the town. The book sets up a raid on the Wickham yacht, and I was braced for it to be tense, and then the raid fails. The yacht is empty. Everly is shot in the backside by her own best friend, by accident, in a running gag the book milks for the rest of its length. This is the point at which I started to respect the book. It admits that plans fail, that people make mistakes, that the villain is not defeated in chapter twelve because the heroine is beautiful and clever. It also means the middle section drags. The characters pace around, talk about ley lines, have a spa day, and the book loses a hundred pages it cannot afford to lose. I am not someone who objects to comfort in a novel, but I do object to comfort being used as filler.

The climax is at an abandoned power plant, which is not abandoned at all but a research laboratory where the Wickhams drain magic from children and sell it. There is a werewolf, Garth, who has been under a spell that makes him betray the group without realising it, and the book plays that honestly enough that I felt sorry for him. Everly sets the children free, punches a member of the Wickham family in the face, and the plant explodes as they escape. I will not tell you who lives and who does not, except to say that the elder Wickham dies at the hands of Lazarus the vampire, and that I found myself cheering for a man I had previously dismissed as a prop. The resolutions are tidy, the casualties are low, and the book ends on a cliffhanger involving a dragon egg the size of a fist, which I take to be the seed of the sequel. The dragon egg is the book in miniature. It looks like a rock. It is glowing, and the heroine is the one who picks it up, because she is the one who trusts her instincts.

The book wants to be about found family, and it is. Everly arrives convinced she has nothing left to give, and leaves, on the final page, the keeper of the Crossroads, surrounded by people who chose her. There is a scene near the end where she tells Nissa that being strong is badass, which I know sounds dreadful, and which I quietly wept over. The book is not embarrassed to be earnest. It is not embarrassed to want things. In a genre that often feels engineered to make fun of itself, there is something disarming about a book that just wants you to feel good about a woman learning to accept her own worth. I spent forty years being careful, and I recognise the courage it takes to stop being careful, even for a fictional character. The book is at its best when it stops explaining the magic and simply watches its heroine become the person she was supposed to be all along.

The prose is serviceable. It is not beautiful, and it does not need to be. Sentences are short, verbs are plain, and the author favours a wry one-liner at the end of a scene that lands, in my experience, seven times out of ten. The dialogue is better. Everly and Delilah have a friendship that feels real, their banter warm and unforced, and Delilah, who functions as comic relief, is given moments of genuine depth. The pacing is the real problem. The book takes a hundred pages to arrive at a point it could have reached in fifty, then rushes the final escape because it needs to set up the sequel. I do not know whether this is how the book works for its intended reader. I suspect it works better for them than it did for me, because the intended reader is here for the company, not the plot. There is a school of readers for whom a well-kept bed and breakfast and a pair of reliable friends are the entire point of a book. I am not in that school. I am old enough to know which school I am in, which is precisely why I can tell you which book this is.

So, who should read it? If you want a beach read with supernatural elements, a heroine your own age, and no ambition more complicated than to make you feel warm, this is it. If you want your fantasy rigorous, your romance complicated, or your plot airtight, it will frustrate you. There is a whole shelf of books like this one, and this is a good example of the shelf. That is both the praise and the warning. It did what it set out to do. It is not great literature, but it does not intend to be, and I would rather read a book that knows its purpose than one that mistakes comfort for depth. I recommend it, then, with conditions, and I have never been the kind of man who recommends things without conditions. If you are the right reader, you will find something here worth your evening. If you are not, you will find something here worth avoiding, and that too is a recommendation, of a kind.

I brought one expectation into this book, and it was not a big one. The premise sounded like a decent cosy: a divorced paralegal, kids grown, sells the house, moves into a cottage behind her great-aunt's rambling seaside inn, where something odd is clearly going on. I read Small Things Like These earlier this year and loved it, so I am not allergic to quiet, gentle fiction about a person starting again. What happened to my expectation is simple. By chapter three I realised the book was not going to let me settle into the story. It was going to keep stepping in front of it.

So, plainly: I did not finish it. I stopped at the end of chapter fourteen out of twenty-two, roughly two thirds of the way in, which took me two evenings. The last eight chapters might be wonderful. I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is exactly what the first fourteen did to make closing the file feel like a decision rather than a lapse.

The opening chapter nearly had me. A sweltering graduation, an ex-husband who turns up with dyed hair and small cruelties, a heroine with a brisk, put-upon voice I recognised. Then Matt slips the hostess a twenty to jump the queue, sneers about her paralegal salary across the dinner table, and later rings to offer her a receptionist job as a personal favour, and I saw the trick. Matt is not a character. He is a machine that produces fresh reasons to root for Everly on demand. Every scene he enters, he says the single worst available thing. I have sat across desks from people untangling shared finances after a split. The cruelty is rarely that tidy.

I did not need him nice. I needed him plausible.

The larger problem is that the book does not trust its own story. Chapter one ends with Everly resolving to finally live for herself. Earned, fine. Chapter two gives her the same realisation over coffee, then Delilah hands it back as a pep talk on a deflating air mattress, then a tarot reading from an earlier visit is recalled to say it again, then she announces "I'm in" at breakfast like a shareholder vote. By chapter nine I had been told she was reinventing herself at least five times. I once watched a manager send three separate emails confirming a single meeting. This had the same feel.

Show me her buying the wrong paint for the cottage and having to live with it. That would tell me more than another speech.

The world underneath is decent, to be fair. An inn built where ley lines cross, obliged to give sanctuary to whatever knocks. A vampire bellhop called Lazarus, which may be the only joke in the book made quietly, and is therefore my favourite. Loretta has genuine sparkle. But the book cannot leave a moment alone.

Everything gets a quip. A sixteen-year-old arrives at midnight, bruised, with a talking raven, having escaped men who put iron cuffs on magical children and priced them like livestock. Within pages we are doing recurring bits about a guest who will not wear clothes. The investigation leads to a spa, and the chapter turns into banter about granny pants and whether a hot cop might one day see your underwear. I have a seven-year-old. Carlos, the little boy who gets taken later, is eight. The whiplash is not a style I can get past. It reads as the book deciding, every single time, that being liked matters more than being felt.

Mr Barry stepping out of the outdoor shower in a towel is funny once. By the third appearance of his stomach, I had stopped smiling.

And then the dart. That is where I got off.

Chapter fourteen, so let me be specific. The big rescue lead collapses: the yacht is empty, the theory was wrong. Marcelo takes a call and learns Carlos has been taken. Everly gets a full page of "maybe I should go back to my old life," a doubt she has already worked through twice. Then, walking off the dock, Delilah bumps the railing, accidentally triggers her magic cuff, and fires a tranquilliser dart into Everly's backside. Blackout. End of chapter. An eight-year-old is in a cage somewhere and the book closes the chapter on a bum gag. I was not even angry. That is almost worse.

The investigation itself runs on coincidence and confession. A scrap of fabric that happens to smell of the spa's own hand lotion. A psychic read of the sleazy Wickham son that produces a name and the sound of splashing water, which everyone instantly agrees must mean the family yacht, because the plot needs the raid to fail. Mostly, people explain things to Everly in comfortable rooms: Loretta with the town map, Rowan with the Wickham family history, Nissa with her kidnapping story. It is exposition with snacks. The one scene where her gift is shown working rather than asserted, a game of cheat before the spa trip, is genuinely charming, which only made me notice how rarely the book manages it elsewhere.

This next bit is my own baggage, and I will own it. She walks out of a twenty-year job, sells the family home, and moves in exchange for "work around the inn," and from then on her own money is never mentioned. Not a pension, not a savings figure, not one nervous night. The book wants credit for a real midlife reinvention while treating every actual mechanism of one as set dressing. I work in finance. Noticing missing numbers is most of my day, and I clocked it here too.

The other thing that ground me down is the destiny talk. "It felt like the universe was sending me a message. And for once, I was ready to listen." "It's in your blood." "I have a good feeling about this place." Everyone keeps informing Everly she is special and meant for this. I do not believe the universe sends messages. I am fairly sure it would not send the same one nine times.

Maybe the last third justifies all of it. I will not find out, because the book spent fourteen chapters telling me what it was about instead of being about it, and I ran out of reasons to keep evenings free for it. If the universe has an opinion on the ending, it knows where to find me.

If you walk through the fiction aisle of any large bookstore right now, you will find a highly specific subgenre crowding the shelves, usually featuring pastel covers with silhouettes of women holding wine glasses or coffee mugs.

Some Like It Psychic belongs squarely on that shelf. It promises a frictionless midlife fantasy where a divorced woman moves to a beach town, suddenly discovers she has magical powers, and immediately attracts the attention of a ruggedly handsome local who happens to be a werewolf. I am going to talk freely about how this particular fantasy resolves, including the final rescue mission, who ends up locked in a cage, and the explosion at the end. If you care about spoilers, consider yourself warned right now.

Everly is forty-something, freshly empty-nested, and deeply tired of her practical paralegal career. With her children out of the house and her ex-husband safely in the rearview mirror, she packs up and moves into a stone cottage behind her great-aunt Loretta’s historic bed and breakfast in the quiet seaside town of Queen’s Landing.

The twist, which is revealed almost immediately, is that the Crossroads Inn is a magical sanctuary. It sits directly on intersecting ley lines, and it caters to witches, vampires, and fairies who need a safe place to sleep.

This book splits neatly into two distinct experiences, and your enjoyment of it will depend entirely on which of those experiences you actually value in a reading session.

On one hand, it is an aggressively breezy, fast-paced distraction that requires zero mental friction to consume. It is the literary equivalent of a mobile game you play on the bus; you do not have to think about the mechanics, you just tap the screen and get the immediate reward of a brightly colored animation. The pacing never drags, the chapters end on easy hooks, and the villains are so cartoonishly evil that you never have to waste a single second pondering moral ambiguity.

On the other hand, if you expect the internal logic of a story to function, or if you want characters who make competent decisions when other people’s lives are on the line, this book will drive you absolutely insane.

The operational failures of the Crossroads Inn alone are enough to make my jaw clench. Loretta and her partner Jane supposedly run a highly secure supernatural safehouse that protects vulnerable magical travelers from dangerous factions. But their entire security protocol consists of a giant paper ledger book, a few pieces of magical jewelry, and a front door that Everly casually forgets to bolt during a thunderstorm.

When a sixteen-year-old storm fae named Nissa shows up in the middle of the night seeking asylum from a ring of magical human traffickers, there is no formal intake process. There is no perimeter lockdown, no secure holding area, and no immediate threat assessment. They just put her in a guest room and hope for the best. Later in the story, Nissa simply walks out of the supposedly secure inn and gets kidnapped again. She manages this because absolutely nobody was assigned to watch the door or track her movements. In my day job, if we launch a campaign and the lead-capture form fails because nobody checked the destination URL, that is a preventable mess, a complete balagan.

Here, a child is abducted from a designated safehouse because the adults in charge could not be bothered to establish a basic line of sight. The narrative just brushes past this massive failure in operational security so Everly can have an excuse to stage a dramatic rescue mission. Nobody asks who owns the failure. Nobody fixes the process.

The rescue mission itself is a masterclass in terrible planning and unearned confidence. Everly discovers that she is psychic, which in this universe mostly just means she gets strong gut feelings about whether people are lying. It functions exactly like basic human intuition, but it gets a magical label so that she does not have to spend years actually learning a craft.

After practicing this newfound skill for roughly five minutes over a game of cards, she is immediately dispatched to a local festival to interrogate Junior Wickham, the smarmy heir to the evil corporate trafficking ring. She sits down with a man who is actively abducting children, asks him a few generic questions, fails to detect any useful lies, and then decides to launch a tactical raid on his family's yacht based on a completely misinterpreted clue. You do not test a broken feature in a live production environment, and you do not send an untrained civilian to execute a hostage rescue. Predictably, the yacht is empty. Everly realizes she was wrong, but before they can formulate a backup plan, she gets shot in the ass with a sleeping dart by her own best friend, Delilah. Delilah is indiscriminately waving around a magical weapon she just pulled out of a secret armory closet, and she accidentally triggers it.

The narrative treats this friendly-fire incident as a quirky, comedic mishap. I found it exhausting. It is hard to care about the high stakes of a human trafficking ring when the heroes treat the investigation like a weekend scavenger hunt.

The villains are just as structurally unsound. Brian Wickham and his sons run Wickham Industries, a former power company that now secretly extracts magic from abducted supernatural children. Brian wants power. Junior wants money. Blade is the brooding, suited enforcer who guards the laundry room at a local spa. None of their corporate logistics make any sense, but they exist strictly to provide a faceless evil for the good guys to punch.

Eventually, Everly figures out that the missing kids are actually being held at an abandoned power plant on the edge of town. This leads to the climax, where she marches right through the front door of the enemy base with a giant golden wolf by her side. She is immediately captured by Blade and locked in a glass cell with the kidnapped children. This setup is engineered specifically to deliver the exact kind of girlboss empowerment scene that always feels entirely unearned.

While trapped, Everly manages to telepathically contact her team waiting outside. Then, she coaches Nissa through unlocking her suppressed elemental magic, which the teenager somehow masters in about ten seconds, frying the electronic cuffs. Everly realizes the cells unlock with a magnetic keycard, so she fakes a medical emergency to lure Junior Wickham into the room.

When Junior opens the door, she punches him directly in the face. She knees him in the groin and delivers a line about being a dumpy, middle-aged bitch who just kicked his ass.

The scene exists purely to manufacture a fist-pumping moment of triumph, but it feels completely hollow. It relies heavily on the villain being unbelievably stupid rather than the hero being genuinely clever. Junior holds all the power, has a secure facility, and knows these people have magic, yet he walks into a holding cell alone because a teenage prisoner yelled at him about needing paper towels. Competence earns my trust faster than confidence, and nobody in this book is actually competent.

The romance subplot functions on the exact same level of transparent wish fulfillment. Marcelo is the local alpha werewolf and the hunky bartender at the Moonshine Bar, and his entire narrative purpose is to validate Everly’s desirability. He tells her she smells delicious. He carries her when she gets shot with the sleeping dart. He constantly shifts from a giant protective wolf into a completely naked, heavily muscled man just to make sure the reader knows exactly how attractive he is. He has no real interior life or flaws. He is simply a very handsome support system who exists to look at Everly with dark, brooding eyes, tell her that her curves are perfect, and then step in to handle the actual physical danger whenever her reckless plans inevitably fall apart.

The magic system itself is treated like an endless convenience dispenser. When the team needs to escape an exploding power plant, Rowan the witch literally picks up a random tree branch, straddles it, and flies away into the night sky. It is ridiculous, but by that point in the book, I had stopped expecting any sort of grounded reality.

And yet, despite all of my irritation, I finished the book in two nights. It is undeniably readable. The prose is completely frictionless, the dialogue moves quickly, and the friendship between Everly, her cynical best friend Delilah, and the local witch Rowan provides enough entertaining banter to carry you right over the glaring plot holes.

I even enjoyed the grumpy vampire bellhop, Lazarus. He mostly just stands in the shadows complaining about the other guests, and he was the only person in the entire building who seemed to realize how ridiculous the situation was. When he casually tackles the main villain in the woods and bites his neck to save a child, it is probably the most efficient operational decision made in the entire novel.

Tachles, this is a book about wanting a do-over. It is about the fantasy of closing the laptop on a boring job, moving to the beach, and suddenly finding out that you are special. It is about realizing your body is perfect just the way it is, and discovering you have the power to fix everything without actually having to put in the years of boring, repetitive maintenance that real expertise requires. At the end, the women literally sit in a magical hot tub while a tray of wine appears out of thin air, and their robes magically change colors to match their personalities. It is the ultimate consumer reward without any of the actual labor.

For a specific kind of reader, that exact fantasy is exactly what they want to buy. If you want a cozy, supernatural beach read that asks nothing of you and delivers a tidy, empowering conclusion where the bad guys lose, you will probably love this.

But if you expect a mystery to actually hold together, or if you are the kind of person who notices when a process is broken and nobody is taking ownership of fixing it, this book will offer you nothing but friction. I wanted to like Everly, but I would absolutely hate having to manage a project with her.

About a third of the way in, Everly gets issued a pair of wrist cuffs that fire tiny darts, one cuff for the ammunition, one for the launcher. When Delilah asks how the darts get loaded, Loretta says "magically" and that's the end of it. I actually laughed, not because it was funny but because I recognised the move. That's the comment you leave in code when you don't want to solve a problem yet: // TODO, figure this out later. Except a book doesn't get a second sprint to come back and fix it. The rest of Some Like It Psychic runs on that same comment, over and over, for 55,000-odd words, and by the end I was reading less like someone enjoying a story and more like someone reviewing a pull request I already knew I was going to reject.

The psychic power is the clearest case. For the first hundred pages it's lie detection, which is at least a rule you can test against: Everly feels a twinge when someone's lying, and the book mostly plays fair with that. Then, because the plot needs her to find a crash site she never saw, it's suddenly retrocognition, done by drinking a potion and closing her eyes. Then it's telepathy, which she discovers she can do mid-crisis with no training and immediately uses to hold a clean two-way conversation with a witch a mile away through solid walls. There's a card game scene early on where Loretta lists off the powers Everly might eventually grow into, telekinesis, psychometry, astral projection, like a changelog of features that never actually ship. I don't need magic to obey physics. I need it to obey itself. A system that gains new, convenient abilities exactly when the plot is stuck isn't a magic system, it's a difficulty slider the author is quietly turning down.

The stakes have the same problem. In the space of about ten pages, a man gets his throat torn out by a vampire, a woman is threatened at needle-point with something the book has already told us is lethal, and a power plant explodes. Twenty minutes later, in book time, the same cast is sitting in a hot tub with a bottle of Moscato that a house-brownie has apparently just delivered, toasting each other's awesomeness. Nobody mentions the dead man again except to note that his body is missing, which is treated as an exciting hook rather than a loose end anyone should be losing sleep over. I don't mind books that are light on their feet. I do mind a body count with no weight attached to it, because it tells me the author doesn't actually believe the danger either.

A lot of that comes down to a refusal to ever let a scene sit still. Nearly every tense beat gets undercut by a quip before it can land, mine's a dry sense of humour myself, I'm not against banter, but here it's constant, and it starts to feel less like character voice and more like the book flinching away from its own tension. Someone points a gun at a group of kidnapped children and the response is a one-liner about brass knuckles. A vampire admits he's just killed a man and gets a bloody-toothed smile and a towel joke thirty seconds later. If everything is a punchline, nothing is actually frightening, and a book about child trafficking rings really ought to manage at least a little dread somewhere in the middle.

The prose has a habit the protocol I'd call "telling it twice." Nissa freezes up a spark of electricity, breaks her own cuffs, and grins. Fine, show me that. Then Everly says out loud, "Being strong is badass," and a page later Nissa repeats it back to her like a chorus, and then it gets repeated again near the end as if it's the moral of the book. Everly punches Junior Wickham in the face, which is a genuinely satisfying beat, and then immediately narrates the exact meaning of the punch to us in case we missed it: this is a woman finally standing up for herself, don't you see. I saw it the first time. I didn't need the subtitles.

There's also a habit of reaching for pop culture instead of actually describing anything. Falling through a magical doorway is "like Alice down the rabbit hole." A rescue plan is compared to Mission: Impossible and then immediately undercut by pointing out it isn't like that at all, which is a strange thing to do twice in one book. Someone is compared to Henry Cavill and Joe Manganiello because apparently that's shorthand enough. None of this is wrong exactly, it's just cheap, the way it's cheaper to link to a Stack Overflow answer than write the two lines of code yourself. I kept waiting for a description that was actually about this world rather than a pointer to a better-known one.

And then there's the front matter, which set the tone before chapter one even started: a dedication thanking the twelve people who pre-ordered, two separate pitches for a free prequel, an author bio that tells you she hasn't yet met her own sexy werewolf bartender. None of that is a crime on its own, self-published books are allowed to be self-published books, but it primes you for exactly the kind of unevenness that follows: a story that hasn't been pushed back on by anyone whose job it was to say "wait, how does this actually work."

The ending is where all of this catches up with the book. Both Wickhams simply vanish from the wreck, no bodies found, which the text treats as a cliffhanger rather than an unresolved plot hole, and the very last beat is a literal dragon egg pulled out of a pocket, presented with a flourish clearly meant to sell book two. I don't object to sequel hooks in principle. I object to a hook standing in for an ending. Nothing in this book actually resolves, the villain doesn't get dealt with, the trafficking operation's buyer is never named, the barrier magic that supposedly only a powerful witch could break gets broken by convenience rather than cost. It reads like the pilot episode of something, not like a book.

I'll say the parts that did work, briefly, because they're real: the running gag about Mr. Barry refusing to wear clothes is mildly funny the first two times, Rowan's introduction as a stressed romance novelist who happens to also be a witch is a decent idea that the book doesn't do much with afterward, and the basic hook, forty-something woman rebuilds her life at a supernatural bed and breakfast, is a fine premise on paper. But a fine premise doesn't survive a system with no rules, stakes with no weight, and jokes in every gap where tension was supposed to build. I finished it, mostly out of the same stubbornness that makes me finish a ticket I've already decided is a mess rather than hand it back half done. I wouldn't pick up the sequel, and I wouldn't tell anyone to start here expecting the plumbing underneath the story to hold any weight, because it doesn't, not once it's actually tested.

Right, no, hold on, because I can already hear the counter-argument and I want to have it properly. Yes, it's a cosy. Yes, you're meant to switch your brain off. I finished it, all twenty-two chapters, so nobody gets to tell me I bailed before the good part. Fair warning, plainly: I'm going to talk about the ending, the villains, and who dies, because that's where the problem shows itself clearest, so if you're partway through Some Like It Psychic, stop reading this now. I went in willing. I liked The Thursday Murder Club. I have no issue with a woman discovering magic at forty-odd, or a seaside town full of werewolves, or a heroine who isn't twenty-three. My issue is that this book doesn't trust its reader, then its plot, then its own subject matter, and my annoyance arrived in that order, so that's the order I'm going in.

Stage one, the small stuff, which stopped being small by about chapter three. Everything happens twice. Everly does a thing, then Everly explains what the thing means for her emotional journey. At graduation, Jonah's grandparents give him a copy of The Giving Tree, a perfectly legible symbol, and two pages later she announces that she is not the Giving Tree and not a worn and weathered stump. The same compliment is paid to her word for word by two different characters, "you're the strongest woman I know", once from Delilah, once from Loretta, like an asset pasted in twice and never preflighted. Nobody gets a trait without a name tag: Delilah is sassy and honest on a schedule, Loretta is eccentric on cue. There's a running seam of psychic puns, deployed whenever Everly has an ordinary human guess. I spend my working life making documents that say things once, clearly, in the right place. A novel that says everything twice is a specific kind of tiring.

Stage two, the plot, which is less a mystery than a delivery round. Everly relives Nissa's kidnapping and spots a heart-shaped boulder, and Rowan happens to know exactly where it is. A scrap of fabric smells of a lotion, and Marcelo happens to place it as the spa's freebie. She pulls the word "Lilith" out of Junior Wickham's head, guesses wrong, drags everyone to an empty yacht, and this should be a proper consequence, except a chapter later Mr Barry, the resident nudist, mentions over breakfast that he cycles past Lilith Lane every day. Case reopened by a bike ride. Her powers arrive on the same schedule. Telepathy turns up mid-crisis because she decides to teach herself out of necessity. The potion meant to boost her is revealed as tap water, framed as empowering but really confirming that nothing ever cost anything. The protective amulet fails against a dart because there's only so much a crystal can do, a rule invented at the moment it's needed. Signal dies on cue. Doors open on cue. The plot doesn't unfold, it gets brought to the room.

Stage three is where irritation turned into something colder, because of what the plot is about. Children are being kidnapped. They're kept in glass cells, in suppression cuffs, sprayed with sedative through the vents, and Brian Wickham holds a syringe of wolfsbane to an eight-year-old's neck. Around that, the book is doing "granny panties" jokes, funnel cake, a mud-bath conversion, and a running bit about Marcelo in too-tight pink sweatpants. The children barely exist as people. Carlos has two traits, hugs and Lego, installed so his abduction lands. After the rescue there's no police, no fallout, parents summoned by magic message, everyone fine by the hot-tub scene. I like a cosy with a body in it. But a cosy works because the cost stays visible, the village notices someone's dead. Here the horror is fuel. A dozen kids in cells exist so a recently divorced woman can feel like a badass, and once they've done that job they're given ice cream and cleared off the page.

Because what the book is actually about isn't magic. It's service. The movers finish before Everly arrives. The boxes are already in the right rooms. Breakfast appears while everyone sleeps; the laundry folds itself; the wine tumblers have her name on; her purse teleports when called. And look, I get the fantasy. I'm the person who finds the missing linked image at five on a Friday; my own draining board is an ongoing diplomatic incident. Being looked after sounds gorgeous. But the book keeps announcing that Everly is living for herself while removing every decision from her. She's told she's psychic, told she's innkeeper by blood, handed a mentor, a plan, weapons, and a werewolf who says she smells delicious. Her one solo call, the marina, fails and is fixed for her. Living for yourself apparently means a town appears and applauds.

That's not empowerment, it's room service with affirmations. Her one real wobble of doubt is fixed in a single garden walk, with a magnolia and a line about the psychic who blooms in adversity that Everly herself spots as nicked from Mulan; Loretta's answer is "whatever". And the laundry nags at me. Chapter one makes a speech of her last ever load of someone else's washing; the rest of the book is washing done by invisible hands, brownies, we're told once, definitely voluntary, don't dwell. The work happens offscreen so the heroine can have her moment. As one of life's offscreen workers, I noticed.

The men are amenities. Marcelo is Old Spice, a growl, the word "delicious", and the pink sweatpants; he carries her unconscious body to the truck and the filmed replay is treated as cute. Matt is a cartoon ex, offering her a receptionist job purely so she can refuse it with a speech. Junior is a popped collar and Croakies, engineered to be kneed. Blade is the only interesting man in it, and his spa lie, "I am no one you need to worry about", one he seems to half believe, gets benched for the sequel. His dad is a monologue in rubber gloves, delivered after Blade jokes that nobody's getting a villain monologue. The book makes the joke, then does the thing anyway.

The ending, since I warned you. The escape works because the villains leave no guards, which Everly clocks and excuses with "pride comes before the fall", the book annotating its own contrivance. Nissa lures Junior over by yelling about a heavy period, fine as farce, very odd as a climax, and Everly knees him into the fetal position with a quip about his future erectile function. Lazarus sinks his fang into Brian Wickham's neck and answers "I hope so, ma'am" when asked if the man's dead; the body is left for the werewolf clean-up crew, offscreen, like every other mess. The explosion that ends the stand-off is, Rowan admits, an accident. Then it's hot tubs and colour-changing robes and a dragon egg Everly pocketed because it was calling to her, because of course there's a dragon egg, because book two needs a hook. The raven says "Nevermore". The one intriguing door in the book, the locked laundry room at the spa, is never opened.

So no. It's not the cosiness, and it's not the midlife heroine; I'm properly fine with both. It's that nothing in this book costs anything, so nothing in it means anything. One sequence nearly got me, a game of BS around Loretta's table, where the lying is the whole game and for a few pages people just sit in a room being funny, and you can see the better book buried in this one. Then it's back to deliveries. The dedication thanks the twelve people who pre-ordered, and it might be the most truthful page here. I hope those twelve are happy. I can't send anyone else in. The folded laundry is a gorgeous fantasy, and if I could order that bit, I would. The rest doesn't get my sign-off.

I finished on the last pages, so I will say this in ordinary language before I go backwards. The book ends with Everly in a hot tub behind the Crossroads Inn with Delilah and Rowan. Nissa, the storm fae who arrived in a yellow raincoat with a raven on her shoulder, identifies a rock Everly took from Junior Wickham's pocket as a dragon egg that does not belong in this realm. Draumin croaks "Nevermore." There is a note that the adventure continues in another book. If you wanted to meet the egg yourself, stop. I did not stop. I wanted to see whether the novel would, even once, let a choice cost the heroine something she could not get back in the next scene. It would not.

That last sequence is not a flourish on an otherwise serious story. It is the method. For most of the second half, children sit in glass cells in a fake laboratory inside the Lightfire Power Plant, iron cuffs on their wrists, sleeping mist in the vents, a buyer waiting for what Brian Wickham calls "the little werewolf brat." Carlos, eight years old, the boy who hugged Rosa at the Oasis, is held with a wolfsbane syringe at his neck. Then the register changes as if someone flipped a switch on a kettle. Loretta snaps silk robes into the air. The robes change color when touched. Jane has laid out towels. There are enchanted massage chairs that, Jane says, need a ley line. Moscato appears on a table beside the tub. Rowan mentions brownies, the house-elf kind, working voluntarily because forced servitude is not allowed in Queen's Landing. Everly is asked whether moving here was the right decision and answers that she is closer to her true potential. I teach people to read the second sentence. The second sentence here is that stolen children and room service can share a weekend if the narrator keeps the same cheerful rhythm for both.

Go backwards from the tub and the explosion is still a cartoon. Rowan holds a barrier for sixty seconds, then later flies out on a stick. Marcelo and Garth become wolves. The plant goes up. Meredith and other pack members are sent to "clean up the mess." Later Marcelo tells Everly there is no sign of the Wickhams. Blade, who already moved Everly through space with a hand on her shoulder, becomes the leftover explanation. Junior has been punched, kneed, and locked in a cell after Nissa lured him with a period story and a roll of paper towels. Brian Wickham has been bitten in the neck by Lazarus, who then accepts a towel from Mr. Barry as if the blood on a bellhop uniform were a stain on a menu. Lazarus says he hopes the man is dead and also that he has never bitten a witch, so only time will tell. That is not consequence. That is a door left open with a polite sign on it. I kept waiting for the book to sit down with the body. It preferred the hug Everly gives the vampire and the pink sweatpants Rowan magics onto Marcelo.

The empty yacht is the same trick earlier, and it is the scene that should have taught Everly something permanent. She drinks a vial before she interviews Junior Wickham at the Splash into Summer Festival. She comes away with a name, Lilith, and the sound of water. Marcelo thinks yacht. The Lilith is eight million dollars and vacant. Delilah's cuff, reloading magically as Loretta promised, puts a dart in Everly's backside on the gangway. Delilah will later say Marcelo had to carry her, and Lazarus will call it romantic. Then at breakfast Rowan admits there was no potion at the festival, only tap water, because Everly does not need help. The confession is written as a gift. What it does is cancel the only lesson the failure might have offered. If she was already complete, the wrong boat was just a joke at her expense. The actual address, Lilith Lane by the old plant, is supplied by Mr. Barry over a newspaper and a pastry, the human guest who air-dries in a towel and discusses his blood sugar. One practical thing: the comic extra finds the building. The psychic restates the clues.

I could live with a messy hunt. I could not live with the work evaporating. Everly quits the paralegal job, packs the house, and takes Loretta's cottage in exchange for work around the inn. We barely see her do that work. A tray of pastries and coffee is inside the cottage while Delilah, a light sleeper, is on the couch. Yesterday's clothes return folded to the Pottery Barn glider. Lazarus, ninety if he is a day and wearing white gloves, parks the car and later lifts an unconscious werewolf onto a metal table in a hidden medical room behind a craft-room bookshelf. Jane grows the garden in sandy soil and pours hibiscus sun tea. When Delilah asks how the food arrived, the book offers secret tunnels or house fairies and tells them not to overthink it. I overthink it. That is my job with a page. Someone baked. Someone washed. The fantasy is not only fae from Eophirea and a doorway that opens in a laundry room. The fantasy is a household in which the extra labor finishes itself so a woman can find herself on a dock with a tumbler of Moscato.

The finding is announced until the words lose meaning. At Jonah's graduation Delilah says they are finally free and Everly's mother calls it a midlife crisis. Matt slides a twenty to a hostess, snaps his fingers across a table of nine, and offers to pay because a paralegal salary would make the bill hard. Everly narrates that she is not the Giving Tree, not a stump. The next morning her father cannot believe she quit a job with good benefits. She drives four hours to Queen's Landing with 90s songs and true crime podcasts, rolls down the windows, and feels stress melt. On the private dock she and Delilah toast saying yes to a new life. After Nissa knocks in the storm and asks for sanctuary, after Loretta unrolls the ley-line map and names Landry women as innkeepers for more than a hundred years, Matt calls with a receptionist job and the line about being single and alone at her age. Everly walks back into the dining room and says, "I'm in." Loretta smiles because she thought she might. That is not a turn. That is the same crossing restaged with better catering. I have written "show me where" in the margin of essays that do this. The thesis returns because the evidence has not moved.

The evidence that Everly is psychic is the same kind of return. Delilah lists the party trick of guessing ages and the habit of knowing a sentence before it is spoken. Loretta names it magic and offers to train her if she stays. Rowan has her drink a memory potion with Nissa, and Everly is suddenly in the van with Twig in iron, Draumin in a cage, rain that she can freeze by shouting stop inside someone else's skull. She notices an off-center heart-shaped boulder because Rowan said to trust intuition. Later they play a lying-card game so she can feel a false seven in her stomach before the spa. At the Oasis she takes a wrong turn to a locked laundry door, the same kind of room Nissa described, and Blade guides her away with a hand on her back and a sentence she reads as a lie he himself believes. Inside the plant her text fails to send, so she invents telepathy, finds Delilah tromping through brush, then Rowan holding a door in the air, and times an evacuation. Each ability arrives in the hour that requires it. I am not asking for a manual. I am asking for friction. A gift that fails only long enough to produce a dart in the glute is not a person learning. It is a key cut to the author's locks.

Nissa is the only figure who sometimes resists, and the book still puts her to use. She is a kid, Jonah's age or younger, black eyes that later go stormy gray, a bruise, a raven who speaks in single words. She is told to sit, to stop the weather, to stay inside the wards. Draumin later reports "Bait" after she leaves. In the cell she cannot at first fry the cuffs. Twig talks about charges. Everly gives her the line that being strong is badass, which Nissa then repeats back like a corrected worksheet. It works. Of course it works. The other children, including Trouble the cat shifter who climbs a gunman's head, become a group that nods when asked if they can follow directions. Their sale is the reason anyone should care, and it is also Delilah's Kill Bill vacation. Rowan is fetched from the Point in pajama bottoms, two socks, and pencils in her hair, bribed with Fireball and a car-crash plot for her romance novel. Marcelo remembers Everly from a dance-off, smells like clean clothes, and keeps being naked, then underdressed, at moments when a child is still missing. I know what the book wants. It wants a crew. A crew is not the same thing as taking the temperature of a sentence in which a man in rubber gloves lines up blood vials and talks about magical pharmacies.

Matt is simpler, which is a different failure. He dyes what hair he has, pooches over a belt, compliments Everly as if he still has a vote, and later takes Jonah's Xbox because the boy will not leave his room. Everly hangs up. The old life needs a body, and the book gives it a body that cannot surprise anyone. Then the men who are not Matt are sorted into functions: Mr. Barry's towel and turkey legs, Lazarus drinking from tourists and preferring memory alteration, Marcelo the alpha whose pack are "natural protectors," Garth the scout whose betrayal is a manipulation spell he did not remember until it wore off. Loretta has already said spells always leave a mark. She also tells Everly in the garden, after the failed yacht, that Jane once said the psychic who blooms in adversity is the most rare and powerful of them all. Everly says she is pretty sure that is Mulan. Loretta waves it off. The novel wants the moral more than it wants the line to belong to a speaker. I have no patience for that in a classroom, and I have less on a Saturday when I have given a book several evenings.

There are many objects. Objects are not an argument. The guest ledger asks for world of origin and special requests, and Nissa answers Eophirea and windows in case she floods the room. The map of Queen's Landing is crossed with golden threads, the inn at an intersection, access points marked on businesses, none at the inn because wards forbid it. Behind a fireplace stone there is an armory Loretta redecorated from a dungeon into something stylish: chainmail that looks like sequined blouses, a suit of armor, wooden stakes, wolfsbane arrows, djinn sneakers for super-speed, ruby earrings that emit a blood pheromone, black tourmaline in silver cages, and the wrist cuffs that hold darts in one and fire them from the other. "Magically," Loretta says, when asked how they load. Delilah knocks her wrists together and laughs. I can picture the drawer. I cannot tell you why any of it had to be practiced, cleaned, or paid for. Klaudia's tarot from Spring Break is remembered as Death, the death of an old way of life, which is another announcement wearing a costume.

The sentences explain a feeling and then explain it again. Everly is scared on the air mattress, then Delilah is proud of her. She is a mama bear in the foyer, then she tells Nissa she is safe. She doubts after the empty boat, then the live-oak walk packages the doubt as poison already cured by Jane's existence. By the time she puts ketchup on eggs and the whole table answers "No" in unison about letting Delilah live down the dart, I had the sensation of a meeting that thinks the attendance list is the work. The granny-panties talk, the back massager nicknamed like a film character, the comments on Marcelo's sweatpants: they are there to prove these women have stopped performing for men. They are performing a different script. The heroine was always magic. The friends never ask her to wash a cup. The inn is a sanctuary for all creatures, and also a place where Lazarus gets stuck because the door to the Dark World will not reopen, which is almost interesting until it becomes another quirky fact to recite on the oyster-shell path.

Brian Wickham's speech in the laboratory is the one idea that almost held. Magic hoarded. Power sold. Later, if the research works, humans buying what they were not born with. Junior is in it for profit and for the pageant and for the blondes. Blade says everyone has reasons, money, power, love, and that Everly has never met anyone like him. Rowan has already explained pure bloodlines, a missing female heir, and Junior's sense that she owes him witch babies. Then the plant explodes, the bodies are gone, and we are in bubbling water with a dragon egg that likes the heat. Rowan says dragons are fiercely protective. Delilah asks what they should do. Find the parents, stop the Wickhams, no break. Draumin says nevermore and flies into the trees. I believed the bird. I do not recommend the book. Not because a divorced woman in her forties is an unworthy center, and not because I need every novel to be grim. Because this one keeps substituting a speech for labor, an inheritance for skill, and a spa day that was also a stakeout for the weight of children in a laundry room. Everly did not want to be the Giving Tree. The novel makes her a different tree, one that fruits when the chapter needs fruit. I read to the last page to be sure. I was sure before the egg. The egg only made the salesmanship obvious.