Review: The Price Guide to the Occult

The Price Guide to the Occult by Leslye Walton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Off the coast of Washington there is an small island and witches live there. A small town's worth of other people also live there but the witches are really the important bit. Well, semi-witches is probably the more accurate descriptor for the last 8 generations of Blackburn women. For hundreds of years this family of witches were powerful but good peeps overall. Unfortunately humans beings aren't known for their high tolerance for magical entities real or imagined. This lead to a many generations of witches being forced to constantly move when their neighbors tolerance levels peaked. So eventually one of these witches, Rona Blackburn, decides she's going to set up a life on a little remote Island where there's not even a dozen other inhabitants. Remote locale hermit lifestyle , all should be good and safe for Rona the witch. Yeah, not so much. Some 18th century drama goes down, there's fires set, babies are born, it's not good. So Rona, sick of all the problems her magic has brought to her life decides she's going to try and bind her powers and keep all the future generations of her family safe from what she's suffered. What results is more like a cruse than a protection and it is passed along to each generations Blackburn woman and then on to her one daughter and so on. Eight generations later our story begins with, Nor, who's chillin, living her life, when one a book arrives at the town psychic shop where she works. A book of available spells, incantation pricing, and an order form. A book of Blackburns spells that have been and should still be unusable due to the Blackburn biding curse. Only it appears Blackburn #8, Nor's mother, has found a way to achieve what ought not be achieved. Also, she's like a supermodel channeling her inner Charles Manson. This is not the best combo and pretty much all hell starts breaking loose from this point on. Good times!


I honestly enjoyed this read. It was a quick fun read that I devoured in pretty much one sitting and that says a lot for a book. I'm ADD to the extreme and this a chronic book jumper. This novel kept my attention firmly in place. It brought to mind books like L.J. Smith's Secret Circle trilogy, and Lana Popovic's Wicked like a Wildfire. I think this book be a pretty good matchup for anyone who has read and enjoyed those stories. I believe this book should be available to the public on March 13, 2018.


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