Spells, Strings, and Forgotten Things: A Review

This post includes affiliate links.

Written by Breanne Randall, Spells, Strings, and Forgotten Things is a witchy, steamy (but not very spicy) novel about broken relationships, sibling love, and choosing healing over fear in the face of impossible odds.

Published on February 27, 2025, this book is as impetuous and colorful as its protagonist. Strong emotions breed strong memories, and thank the goddess for that, or our main character wouldn’t be very powerful, in more ways than one.

Calliope Petridi is beautiful, bold, and broken. She’s twenty-five and confident, living life as it comes and trying not to look back. Because when she does, all she sees are scattered memories of everyone who left her behind. She makes memories to forget, trading them for spells to maintain and strengthen the enchantments of her family’s biggest, most powerful secret. A secret that her two sisters, Thalia and Eurydice, have tried to ignore.

At the center of the Forgotten Forest, where all life has stilled and even the wind holds its breath, stands the Dark Oak: an ancient tree harboring a powerful magic. The Petridis have guarded the tree from time immemorial. Witches cursed to trade memories for magic, they have hidden themselves and the Dark Oak from the world and its greed. Especially from dangerous Shadowcrafters, whose only drive is to accumulate more power.

But when Calliope visits the tree, attempting to validate her suspicions to her skeptical sisters that the tree’s enchantments are weakening, she accidentally binds herself to a trespassing Shadowcrafter and endangers not just herself but also her sisters, their relationship, and their whole town.

And the secret to saving all of that lies in her ability and willingness to repair her bonds with her sisters and break the bond she made with the suspicious and dangerous Shadowcrafter.

I rate this book three stars. The plot is interesting enough to keep me reading but predictable enough that, even though I think I skipped a few chapters, I still understood everything without confusion.

Now, I want to start off by saying that this is not a genre that I typically read. The cozy fantasy romance books are not high on my TBR, if they’re present at all, mostly due to their low-stakes nature and their romantic nature. Having said that, I would say this book is for fans of The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling. It reads similarly and has a lot of the same themes. And, as it turns out, most of the things I didn’t like about that book are things I don’t like about this book. (I didn’t write a review about that book, but if people would like me to, let me know in the comments.)

That isn’t to say that this book is bad; it isn’t. It has a well-developed storyline with a diverse cast and a refreshing twist that almost makes the predictability of the book bearable.

However, the presence of many genre-defining tropes and not-so-hidden messages made the book feel at times ingenuous and at other times preachy. And, while I agree with the messages it’s telling, I don’t appreciate them telling the story instead of the other way around.

During any of the scenes where a character takes steps toward personal growth and healing, I felt they explain too much and make the character growth too obvious and, in some cases, too simple. I recognized each step as it happened, which took me out of the story and sometimes even made it difficult to reenter the story.

Regarding characterization, I think the characters are three-dimensional: with backstories, quirks, preferences, pet peeves, and hobbies; but in a way that seems like someone took a paper doll and added characteristics and traits until it stood on its own. They don’t feel like real people, they feel like puppets: three-dimensional but not alive. Built to fulfill a role.

I do want to add that this book has characters of many ethnicities and LGBTQIA+ alignments, and I think this was handled well. There’s not a lot of attention drawn to it, as it’s not pertinent to the plot, but it’s still evident and treated respectfully.

Whatever the case, this is a book about healing familial wounds, confronting your own prejudices and biases, and learning to move beyond the persona you created for the world and becoming who you always wanted to be.

Warning: this book deals with abandonment, grief, references of child abuse, childhood trauma, and death.