The Ex Hex

Every autumn the desk's postbag fills with requests for the seasonal shelf, and The Ex Hex is the book we hand over first, usually with a mug. Erin Sterling's witchy romcom is pumpkin-flavoured by open declaration — small Georgia mountain town, haunted college, a shop that sells crystals to tourists — and underneath the seasonal dressing runs a soundly built second-chance romance about the one that got away coming back to find the door cursed. Literally, in this case, which is the premise's whole delicious mechanism.

Nine years ago, nineteen-year-old witch Vivienne Jones was freshly dumped by Rhys Penhallow, summer love and son of the founding magical family, and did what heartbroken young witches with vodka and a bathroom candle should never do: improvised a curse. It was, all parties agreed at the time, too minor to matter. Rhys returns to Graves Glen a decade later to perform his family's ceremonial duty, recharging the ley lines that power the town's magic, and the moment he touches them, Vivi's forgotten malediction arrives like an unpaid invoice with compound interest. The town's magic curdles: talking skulls develop opinions, a haunted attraction stops pretending, and the only fix requires the town's two most combustible exes to work together through an escalating supernatural farce with a body count of dignity rather than people.

What the desk admires is the calibration. Sterling keeps the stakes real enough to drive the plot and light enough to protect the tone, and the reunion romance underneath is honest about its central question, whether the people who fit at nineteen are the same people standing in the wreckage at twenty-eight. The answer arrives with more care than the packaging promises. The banter is properly funny, the town is a character with zoning laws, and the heat, when the exes stop bickering long enough, is confident and cheerfully unembarrassed.

Honest notices: this is seasonal comfort food and knows it — readers wanting their witchcraft systematised or their stakes existential should visit the romantasy shelf instead. The third-act crisis resolves at holiday-special speed. Content notes are mercifully few.

Who is this for? October readers, second-chance fans who like consequences with their nostalgia, and anyone who has ever regretted a decision made with a candle. A sequel hands the town to the next couple. The desk rereads this one annually, by which we mean every September, on schedule, with the mug, and considers the ritual part of the book's design. Some novels are destinations and some are seasons. This one arrives when the light changes, and it keeps the appointment.