Nadia El-Fassi’s debut romance, Best Hex Ever, follows kitchen witch Dina and museum curator Scott through a whirlwind weekend in which they can’t deny their attraction to each other. There’s just one problem: Dina was inadvertently hexed in college by an angry ex-girlfriend. Any time she experiences romantic love, the object of her affections gets hurt. Unable to remove the hex, and fearful to admit to her witchy mother that the partner who hexed her was a girl because she’s bisexual, she’s stuck between a rock and a (this is going to be an innuendo; get ready for it) hard place. But the feelings between her and Scott are growing, and she can’t help but hope that this time—somehow—it’ll be different.
Best Hex Ever falls into the subgenre of fantasy romance novels that are light on the fantasy, heavy on the romance; books whose authors have definitely watched Practical Magic at midnight over margaritas. (That is not a dig. I love margaritas, and I love Practical Magic. I do not love staying up until midnight, but that’s not a judgment either; I just really need eight solid hours of sleep or else I will spend all my waking hours fretting about The Horrors.) Dina uses her magic mainly for small things: imbuing the teas and pastries she serves at her bakery with specific memories and emotions, putting mild jinxes on creeps at bars, and communing with the dead at Samhain. By and large, her day-to-day life isn’t too dissimilar from yours or mine.
Despite this, or maybe because of it, El-Fassi makes Dina’s magical world feel both complete and comfortably lived-in. Her mother, Noor, has magic that tends toward the psychic, reading the moods of her loved ones and mildly predicting the future. Her friend Rosemary can see ghosts sometimes, which marks her out as the protagonist of the sequel to Best Hex Ever. Dina’s childhood home is magic in itself, shaping the rooms to fit the desires and needs of its inhabitants (and one time packing sexy underwear in Dina’s overnight bag to ensure that she has a fun weekend).
Magic exists as a practice of care and community in this book—my favorite thing about it! The book is mainly set at the wedding weekend of Dina’s best friend Immy to Scott’s best friend Eric, and there’s a truly lovely scene early on where Dina makes samples of the cinnamon rolls that she’s going to make for the wedding.
As they continued to prepare the cinnamon buns, Dina prompted Immy to tell them other things she loved about Eric, to recount other treasured memories, and she put them into the dough too. Anyone eating these cinnamon buns would be filled with a deep sensation of love all around them… This spell would make people look at Immy and Eric and think, Wow, they really love each other.
While I’ve read various takes on the Like Water for Chocolate trope, I loved this iteration of it the best. Baking together, sharing food, and sharing memories really are powerful expressions of community (despite my personal fear of baking), so Dina’s magic accentuates and literalizes something that already exists in our world. In a context where magic represents care for community, it makes sense that a failure of care on Dina’s part—casting a spell to make her girlfriend want to see her again after an argument—gives rise to the book’s central fracture.
As much as the friendships and family relationships worked for me, I found the central romantic relationship really frustrating. Scott and Dina are instantly attracted to each other when they meet at Dina’s café—fine, that happens! They meet again at Eric and Immy’s wedding weekend, where their matchmaking friends have put them in a shared house for the duration of the festivities—good, great, love that kind of set-up.
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Best Hex Ever
Where the book lost me was the immediate insistence that they are in love and it is serious and they are each other’s person, without any real build-up to that conclusion or much sense of why they’re supposedly so well-matched. Scott’s excited that Dina seems interested in apotropaic magic traditions, as he’s in the midst of organizing an exhibit on that theme for the British Museum. As far as I could tell, that’s the only thing besides extreme sexual chemistry that they have in common. And look, people can have a super-hot sex weekend. I support that completely! It’s just that if I’m then being asked to believe that they’ll live happily ever after together, I want to know what other points of connection exist between them.
(Scott’s exhibit sounds great, by the way. I would go to that exhibit. I would read all the informational signs at that exhibit. I would ask Scott ten thousand questions about that exhibit when he was trying to go down on me; it would be the sexy version of when the dental hygienist puts all her fingers in your mouth and then demands to know the details of your recent trip to Nova Scotia. It’s unrelatable to me that Dina does not do this.)
First novels can feel like a complex, but unfinished, connect-the-dot activity. You can see the general shape of what was intended, but not all the lines join up and you’re left squinting at some of the detail work trying to figure out if that blob was meant to be a heart or a star. Part of the reason Dina and Scott’s romance felt unfinished is that the characters feel unfinished. I had a stronger sense of Dina than Scott, probably because we see many more points of connection for her, to friends and family and work, but neither of them are fully cooked.
And that creates knock-on effects! I never felt particularly fussed about the success of Dina and Scott’s relationship because I never bought that they were in such serious, life-changing love in the first place. When the origins of Dina’s hex are finally, fully revealed, fittingly through a communal effort with her mom, that reveal doesn’t feel grounded in what we already know about Dina. We’re told it happened for an emotional reason that hasn’t especially been part of Dina’s attempts to navigate her relationship with Scott. Fortunately, because El-Fassi has put in the work to show us Dina’s strong family ties, the moment of lifting the hex still hits, even as I didn’t really buy the reason we’re told the hex exists in the first place.
As an SFF romance professional—who still isn’t consistently using the term romantasy and nobody can make me—I’m always excited to see new voices in this space. There’s enough good here, particularly in the author’s evocation of the many shapes and manifestations of love and family, to make me eager to keep following Nadia El-Fassi’s work in the future.
Best Hex Ever is published by Dell.
