I'm going to join the chorus here and say that I should have loved Witch Please and instead I found it to be "fine." The setup is fun! A bisexual baker who's chronically unlucky in love and the fix-it witch next door who's sworn off relationships fall for each other. If this had been a sweet novella, I would have loved it, but apparently there wasn't really enough plot here to keep the story going for a whole novel without Aguirre throwing in an evil grandmother and an inadvertently harmful mother.
There were lots of strong female relationships in the book so it didn't feel like a "women hate women" kind of story, but the external conflict was just clunky. When the entire conflict could be resolved by a single conversation between mother and daughter--who supposedly talk to each other regularly--any time in the last twenty years, the book feels like a bit of a letdown. I was also annoyed at the treatment of Titus, a baker who is as cinnamon-roll-y as the cinnamon rolls he makes each morning. (See the spoiler below.)
In case you're wondering, this book is spicier than I expected. Several sex scenes starting well before the halfway point. Titus is a virgin at the beginning of it all, but he has many firsts by the end.
Witch Please was fine, but the love interests in the next book, Boss Witch, were in this one and I'm looking forward to their story. Aguirre's books are hit or miss for me, so I'm going to keep my hopes up and see what we get.
Audio Notes: The narrator, Ava Lucas, does her best with what she's given, but parts of the story don't translate well to audio. Aguirre's characters do a lot of inner monologuing, with frequent asides that, on audio, sound a lot like their voiced speech. Though Lucas pitches her voice differently when the characters are thinking instead of speaking, it's so frequent that it threw me out of the story several times because I sometimes couldn't tell whether the character was professing their love or confessing their truths out loud or just thinking it.
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I received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher for review.
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SPOILER: I was pretty unhappy when I realized that Titus' heartbreak, the fact that he was convinced for years that he'd die alone, was because of something that Danica's mother had done when she was little to protect Danica. No one explains this to him or tries to make it up to him, because she's never going to tell him that she's a real witch, just that she's "into New Age stuff."
Content warnings: prejudice, controlling/emotionally abusive grandparent, I'm sure there are other things
