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The Book Witch
Meg Shaffer
Ballantine Books
320 Pages
Pub. Date April 7, 2026
“All stories are love stories if you love stories.” This is a line from this book that will resonate with me. I see myself quoting this. It is an answer to the question of why people love to read. Anyone who loves books as much as I do, will enjoy it. It also helps to be well read.
Meg Shaffer is an anomaly to me; I am normally not a fan of fantasy as a genre but her work is filled with some whimsy, that I cannot help but like it. It is jolly good fun. Nothing, and I mean nothing, quite measures up to The Wishing Game, but this comes close. It is hard not to smile when the protagonist’s name is Rainy March. It is the job of a book witch to protect books by jumping into them and working their magic. There is no child alive who is a book lover who has not wanted that job, or at least to have the power to jump into books. I know I certainly do. I mean did.
There are all sorts of rules that apply to book witches in order to protect the story from being altered. One is that a book witch cannot become romantically involved. One also needs to be a secondary character. It is hard to have a book full of fantasy where there are not rules that are broken so Rainy, of course, falls in love with a character in one of the novels. There is a rule enforcer who is a villain of sorts. It is all good fun, if a tad bit confusing at times. There is also a twist at the end which I did not foresee; I kept having to look back to check on what was happening.
Even though I am not typically a fan of fantasy, the world building in this novel was truly phenomenal. I was totally immersed in this world of books. It helped that I had read most of the novels that were mentioned in the book, especially The Great Gatsby. Truthfully, some of the depth of this book will be lost if one is not a true reader. Many of the references will just fall flat. But for the rest of us, it is just good fun.
Thanks to Ballantine and NetGalley for advanced copies of this book. All of the opinions herein are my own.
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