Book Review: The Witch Who Couldn't Spell

Title: The Witch Who Couldn't Spell

Author: Katie Penryn

Date: 2016

Publisher: Karibu

ISBN: 9782901556008

Quote: "One thing I'd been able to do all my life was move objects about. Not with my hands...with my thoughts."

Mpenzi Munro (Penzi for short) is not the usual English redhead. For one thing her father, Sir Alexander, was obsessed with Africa, lived there while his wife was at home, and stayed there when she left the house in Penzi's hands. Being the equivalent of a single mother to her younger brothers while finishing a degree and proving herself as a barrister, she's had no time for serious romance, though she's apparently not the type men can leave alone easily. She has psychokinetic powers, which her mother has told her makes her "a witch," in the non-religious TV-sitcom tradition. And she's so dyslexic she can hardly read; she's got through life relying on the little boys to read things to her. 

This full-length novel opens a series. Penzi's father wanted her and middle brother Sam to drop her law career and his still incomplete education, and reopen an antique store that's been moldering away for years on the coast of France. His secret agenda was apparently for them to keep an eye on their mother, who is a competent adult, but not the most competent. When they arrive, right away they find a murder victim stashed in the antique refrigerator their mother shoved out the door, and they spend the rest of this novel solving the murder just to prove their mother didn't do it. 

While they're there, Penzi accepts that she has magic powers; her mother sends her the family grimoire to learn how to activate them, and her father posthumously sends her a cat, Felix. Felix is actually a shapeshifter. He's comfortable being a fancy breed of cat but he can also do both human and leopard. Normal humans, however, usually see him as a cat when witches can see, and he can use the benefits of, human or leopard form. 

For me this piece of fantasy tears it. If a character is going to stand six feet tall and use fingers and thumbs, people aren't going to believe he's a cat, and unless his human form is more solidly ace or "gay" than Felix seems to be, his relationship with Penzi is sort of disgusting. If your pet thinks of your bed as anything beyond a warm soft safe place to take a nap, you don't let it in the bedroom, do you?  But evidently some readers don't mind that the characterization of Felix is illogical and tasteless. The series sells.

And why might that be? Because, if not logical, it is at least fun and funny to read? Because a completely ridiculous story works better for escape reading than a story that recalls the mind back to situations of concern in the real world? 

Anyway, this is a reasonably well written, borderline cozy mystery; Penzi gets hurt, deliberately, in a way that may trigger some readers' inner Bear Parental Unit, but nobody who has a speaking part in the story dies. There are hints of romance or even sex further along in the series. There is no real profanity. This is a totally frivolous, even silly, story to pass the time during a few commutes and/or boring meetings.