The Late-Night Witches by Auralee Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
The Late-Night Witches is a Cozy Paranormal story from Auralee Wallace. I really enjoyed Wallace’s Evenfall Witches B&B series and have been excited to read more from her.
When I saw this cover, I knew I’d have to read it. It’s absolutely adorable and I had no doubt that the story would fit the Halloweeny cover art. Spoiler alert: it definitely did!
This story, which is set on the atmospheric Prince Edward Island off the Eastern Coast of Canada, follows Cassie, her younger sister, Eliza, and the rest of their family, during the spookiest month of the year, October.
Oh yeah, and also, vampires have invaded the island and legacy dictates that they need to be the ones to defeat them. The set-up of this was a lot of fun and gave me heavy Practical Magic vibes, but not in a copy cat way, more in a comforting way if that makes sense.
I loved Cassie as a MC. She’s a typical older sister, but also a Mom to 3-kids, parenting by herself as her husband works overseas. Eliza is also a typical younger sister, and as a younger sister myself, I found it easy to connect with her.
The interactions among the family brought the cozy for me. They have an estranged Aunt, Dorcas, who due to the whole vampire thing, they end up reaching out to and unsurprisingly they a learn a lot from her about their family, and the special powers they may hold.
I also liked Cassie’s kids. I normally find children rather annoying in books, but I thought here the scenes with them ended up being more fun than trying, and I loved the banter.
The vampire bits were also fun, and I was laughing out loud in quite a few places. I would definitely recommend this to fans of Auralee Wallace’s other books, as well as fans of Lindy Ryan’s Bless Your Heart series. The humor and cozy level is fairly similar to that series, IMO.
Thank you to the publisher, Ace, for providing me a copy to read and review. It sounds like there could be a sequel to this, and I would absolutely pick it up!