Do you like animal sidekicks, cathartic magic, and scruffy sweethearts as love interests? Then the tarot cards indicate that Hexes & Vexes by Nova Blake will be your next magical read.
Hexes & Vexes is a novella in the Witchy Fiction project, a shared project by a group of authors from Aotearoa New Zealand. The tagline for the Witchy Fiction project is “Contemporary Witchy Fiction … with a dash of romance” — a descriptor that is very apt for this novella, indeed.
Hexes & Vexes is a small-scale character-focussed story set in small town Aotearoa. Blake has written a story that is both definitely speculative but also definitely of the New Zealand literary tradition. Themes of family, history, place, hurt, and reconciliation thread through the story in ways that are informed by her indigeneity (Blake is Kāi Tahu and Makaawhio Māori). This is a story of finding the courage to choose the more difficult but ultimately more healing pathway through a conflict.
The romance plotline, too, is a cathartic read. The main character, Mia, meets someone who likes her just as she is, and asks no more or less of her than she is willing to give at any moment. It’s an understated romance, perhaps, but in a way that feels aspirational and true.
For me, it was the small details that I really appreciated in this story. I’ve spent time in a small town, even if only a few years, and so descriptions like the Four Square across the road from the community/school hall, the way the garden of the house backs onto fields, even Mia’s memories of eating jelly crystals with her friends as a kid (at my school it was Raro sachets, but close enough) felt so immediately recognisable to me.
I’m looking forward to catching up with the rest of the Witchy Fiction novellas.
Old wounds are hard to close; especially when someone pries them open.
Small towns are full of gossip, and Mia is pretty sure that no one in her hometown of Okato has ever stopped talking about her. Cast off by her best friend, blamed for a local tragedy – Mia had no choice but to run away.
Now, ten years later, she’s being dragged back.
Something’s wrong with her big sister, Camilla, and her younger sister, Poppy, is panicking. At first, Mia just wants to check in and get out of town again as soon as possible. But when strange occurrences start to pile up, she realizes that there is something more than her perpetual bad luck at play; and the traces of magic she finds in her childhood home suggests that whatever is going on with Camilla could be caused by hexes, too.
Mia is determined to find out what’s going on. If she can stop getting distracted by the hunky painter renovating her childhood bedroom, that is.
Screw running away again.
It's time to bury the past once and for all.
