Hex Life

Hex Life is an anthology of witch stories. I bought it because Amber Benson has a story in here and I'm currently reading her works. 

I'll do my usual anthology treatment, which is making a list of the stories and my brief impressions. 

A Invitation to a Burning: I feel like I can't summarize this without giving away the entire plot. It was good, but not great. 

Widows' Walk: Four widow witches live together in a house. Their ages range from 59-82. They work together to help a young girl in a bad home situation. I liked this one. 

Black Magic Momma: This one is set in Kelley Armstrong's Otherworld series and it interested me enough that I may read all 13 of those books. Otherworld, predictably, is about a bunch of different supernatural types. 

The Night Nurse: A mother of two who doesn't want her third ends up hiring a night nurse to help her manage the baby. The husband is useless aside from working to pay the bills. As the night nurse slowly worms her way farther and farther into the mother's life, her agenda becomes known. I didn't hate this, but it went on way too long. 

The Memories of Trees: Post-apocalyptic new religion hates witches. A witch and her foster daughter fight back. I liked this. 

Home: This one is set in Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires world. It wasn't bad, but I think I would have liked it better had I some knowledge of the characters. Unlike Otherworld, this one did not make me want to read the series. 

The Deer Wife: Woman has an affair with a deer shapeshifter woman or whatever she is. I liked this. 

The Dancer: Telekinetic/pyrokinetic teen girl is upset her family moved her way from her ballet classes in New York. A man with similar powers comes to help and ends up having to save her. 

Bless Your Heart: Ah, love that title. A Texan woman with a young gay son resorts to cooking witchcraft to get her message across to the mother of his bully. This was fun. 

The Debt: A girl visits Poland with her widowed father and...let's just say Baba Yaga is in it. This one is bleak. 

Toil & Trouble: A girl working for the three Macbeth witches (I guess? They also have aspects of both the Greek fates and the gray sisters.) wants to be free of them but runs afoul of one of the...I'm assuming...Dark-Hunters. Another one where it would have helped to have some knowledge of the series before I'd read this, though this one worked better than the vampire story. The Dark-Hunter world seems quite huge, so I don't think I'll ever be reading it, but I didn't hate this at all. 

Last Stop on Route Nine: A young black girl and her younger teen cousin go through some sort of portal and get run off by a racist witch. I feel like this is part of the larger world the author has created and I've never read anything of. 

Where Relics Go to Dream and Die: A dying man and a witch trapped in a candle. Interesting. 

This Skin: This one is Amber Benson's. A teen girl is under investigation for a mass murder at her school. Loved this. I love Amber. 

Haint Me Too: Set during the sharecropping days at the famous Myrtles plantation in Louisiana. If you do read this book, stop before you start this story and read about the hauntings at the plantation. This was good, but it helps to have some of the backstory if you don't know about it. 

The Nekrolog: A somewhat confusing story told from three different perspectives. I don't really get witch here. More like superpowers. I didn't really understand the story. 

Gold Among the Black: A young orphan girl in medieval-ish times works in the castle but spends her nights in the forest because they won't allow her big black dog inside. She's warned by a kind man that she's becoming old enough that it's not safe to be alone, and then she's told by a fellow servant that she's thought of as a witch because of her dog and her solitude. The girl is rightly afraid and her dog ends up turning into a human. After an incident with a would-be rapist, the girl and dog/man flee together. 

How to Become a Witch-Queen: A very interesting take on Snow White in her middle-aged years. Loved this. 

Definitely recommend this book if you like witchy fun stories. Not that all of them are fun. A couple don't end well. I didn't actively dislike any stories. The biggest failing is that I didn't connect with a couple set in their own worlds from outside this anthology, and the one I feel like there was something I wasn't grasping.