A Circle of Uncommon Witches by Paige Crutcher – Review

Published: February 25, 2025

Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

Series: N/A

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

Pages: 320 (Kindle)

My Rating: DNF @ 54%

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
A witch generationally cursed to never find true love sets out to break the spell cast on her family, and must team up with the last person who wants to help her – the witch who set the curse in the first place.

Doreen MacKinnon is doomed to die of a broken heart – if she can’t break the centuries old curse placed on her family.

Three hundred years ago, Ambrose MacDonald, a powerful male witch, fell in love with a MacKinnon. And when the MacKinnon witches forbade him from seeing his love, by secretly hiding her away, he retaliated by cursing the family and its future generations to never find love. But it wasn’t without a cost. Now, Ambrose is imprisoned by those same witches, trapped in a tempest and doomed to outlive everyone he has ever loved.

But Doreen isn’t like the other MacKinnon witches. As the 13th generation of the MacKinnon line, Doreen is one of the most powerful witches in centuries… and one of the loneliest. So when she discovers where Ambrose has been trapped, she releases him to help her break the curse, once and for all. Ambrose agrees to help, but with his own motive: vengeance. He plans to use her as bait to enact his revenge on her family.

Together, they enter a series of trials, which take them to a castle in Scotland, off a cliff, and into a world beyond their wildest dreams. As they work together, sparks start to fly, but soon Doreen must choose how far she is willing to go to break the curse, and what she’s willing to sacrifice.

Paige Crutcher’s A Circle of Uncommon Witches is a story of adventure, romance, and destiny, that asks: is true love worth the cost?

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A Circle of Uncommon Witches was, unfortunately, really not the book for me. The premise was promising – a witch must break a curse placed on her family line in order to find true love and not die by the age of 30 and in order to do so, she must free the male witch who cursed the MacKinnon line and undertake a series of trials. Seems like a straightforward, enjoyable romantasy but alas, I found myself bored to tears!

Doreen MacKinnon refuses to cave and marry a man simply to save her own life – she will settle for nothing less than proper love without the taint of a charm spell – but in order to do so she has to free Ambrose MacDonald. Ambrose has been trapped in a spell and tortured by the witches of her family for three centuries all thanks to some failed love with Lenora MacKinnon. The two unlikely allies set out to enter a series of magical trials in order to break the curse. I’ll be quite honest, this is as far as I got in the book because it was just underwhelming and I found myself bored. I kept pushing onward because it’s on the shorter side (320 pages) and I could easily read 10% here and there, but at the halfway point, not much had really happened. The trials had only barely begun and I felt the start was lackluster and quite frankly, I just didn’t care what happened to these characters.

Though I liked the beginning of the book, things started to deteriorate quickly. First of all, the MacKinnon witches are pretty awful. Doreen’s aunt Stella is a piece of work and it’s quickly made clear she’ll do anything to maintain the status quo, though it’s not all that clear why other than she really supports this bizarre centuries old grudge. Next, Ambrose, who has been trapped in a spell for 300 years is also remarkably up to date on the modern world, including the lingo and even implies he can totally drive the car he just ‘borrowed’. I think this was a cheap way out of what could have been a really interesting addition to the story – Doreen having to teach him at least a few basics of the modern world. The excuse behind this was that he can “see” what’s going on outside of the entrapping spell. Lame!

I suppose I’ll never know if the trials were actually interesting because I DNF’d this at 54% and they had only just begun. It seems like there were some interesting ideas here that just didn’t come together as cohesively as I would have liked. I wanted to like this and struggled onward past where I would typically DNF but ultimately decided to pursue a book I would actually enjoy – too many books to spend time reading one you don’t like!