Lia Amador’s whimsically winning Witch You Would takes place in a world just like our own except that magic is an integral part of everyday life, to the point that it’s on the curriculum in public schools. One steamy summer, after anonymously exchanging emails about magic and falling for each other for months, two of Miami’s best spellcasters, Gil Contreras and Penelope Delmar, are thrown together on a popular competition reality show that each hopes will be a much-needed lifeline.
On the surface, Penelope and Gil are opposites. Penelope is a meticulous “spell technician-slash-salesgirl at a magic supply shop,” a thankless dead-end job she’s been working for seven years that barely covers the rent. She has an exploitative boss, a love of magical theory and a troublesome tendency to catastrophize. Gil is a sensitive and sweet academic who takes months to work up the gumption to even think about asking Penelope out—but online he’s social media darling Leandro Presto, known for comic relief as much as magic. While he’s weary of giving more oxygen to his stumbling, bumbling alter ego, Gil is convinced to do the show by his producers, besties and the $100,000 charity donation that celebrity entrants get if they win, which could save his grandfather’s beloved magic school.
For these penpals, competing on the “Spellebrity Edition” of Cast Judgment, the mystical equivalent of Top Chef or Project Runway, should be the ultimate meet cute, except that working with Leandro is Penelope’s nightmare. She had her heart set on partnering with her idol Charlotte Sharp, the owner of a multicity spell company. Plus, a bad experience in Penelope’s past has made her borderline obsessive about precision and safety, and Leandro is the magical equivalent of an accident-prone clown. Even though in real life, Gil is exactly the type of guy Penelope would love to go out with: an adjunct professor who holds a doctorate in magical theory and writes a blog “where he helped people with spell problems and shared recipes that actually worked.”
Despite their personality conflicts, Penelope and Gil are soon making beautiful enchantments together. Amador’s scenes of magical creation are vivid and spellbinding. And though some readers will find the dramatic tension a little tenuous, Amador does a wonderful job rounding out both characters’ emotional states and their connection as Miami Cubans in the dual-perspective narration. This is romance at its sweet and frothiest, medium-low stakes but high reward.