THE SWEETEST KIND OF FATE

The story of Amber Sand, matchmaker extraordinaire, continues after The Best Kind of Magic (2017).

There’s a lot going on in Amber’s life: her part-time jobs at a bakery, a restaurant for supernatural creatures, and her mother’s magic shop, on top of her senior course load and working on her application to the Chicago Culinary Institute, and making time for her friends Amani Sharma and Kim Li and boyfriend, Charlie Blitzman. But things get more complicated when her nemesis, Ivy Chamberlain, comes to Amber for help in persuading Ivy’s sister, Iris, not to become a mermaid in order to marry her girlfriend. It seems Iris has gone for help to Victoria, an evil witch who used to be Amber’s mother’s best friend. Worst of all, Amber keeps getting glimpses of Charlie’s true love—and it’s Kim. Will she give in to fate? Will her mother defeat Victoria? Will she get through this after blowing up all of her relationships? Most of these multiple storylines find shallow and lackluster conclusions. Both Sand women suffer from immaturity—Amber in digging into her mother’s past and Amber’s mother with her stubborn secrecy. Besides her immaturity, Amber’s misanthropic tendencies make her moments of altruism feel forced. Racial and ethnic diversity is cued with naming conventions; the book otherwise largely adheres to the white default.

A sequel with even less magic—literal and figurative—than its predecessor.