I really enjoy fantasy and reading stories that involve witches. I think my appreciation for this type of book started when a friend told me I should read Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. I read it quite a bit before it was made into a movie and *LOVED* the book. I have read several other Alice Hoffman books that involve witchy women and really enjoyed them. I've also read a few Paula Brackston books and found them to be enjoyable as well so I was really looking forward to reading a book by a local author that was a witchy mystery. 
So, I just read a book that was about a "Southern Witch". It started out pretty good; the main character was kind of a rebel at the beginning and at first I just found the narrator (I was taking a road trip so I listened to it on Audible) to be annoying because it felt like she was overdoing the accent and she had a funny way of not enunciating words with "l" in them. For example; she would say "cold" as "coad" and "called" as "cawed". It drove me nuts, but I decided to try and not hold that against the book. However, when I started hearing phrases like "well butter my butt and call me a biscuit", "what in the Sam Houston" and "Hell fire and biscuits" I just cringed and felt my eye twitch. I know there are some people in Texas (and other places) that use phrases like this, but it felt like she was trying a little too hard to "color" the language southern.
It reminded me of one of the things that annoyed me most about Fifty Shades of Grey; Anastasia's internal dialogue with herself kept talking about her "inner goddess", but I digress. It just seemed to be repetitive. It just bugged me; to the point of making me not enjoy the book very much. I caught myself rolling my eyes every time one of these "southern-isms" came up in the book and even groaning a time or two. Well, there was that and the fact that the main character (named Tammy Jo - again with the "southern" stereotype) seemed to have low self esteem. She continued to have "relations" with her bossy ex-husband and then also find herself interested and even sleeping with another man and letting him "take power" from her in-between interludes with her not-so-ex-husband. I just felt like she wasn't the kind of character I really could get into. Needless to say, I probably won't read the rest of the series because I just didn't like her very much. She wore a locket that contained the ghost of a relative and I felt like a story centered around the ghost or the main character's cat, an ocelot, might be more interesting.
I'll admit; I knew this book would have a certain amount of fluff and was looking forward to a lighthearted read. While this book had a decent plot  I felt like the overly-southern phrases and the way I felt about the main character tipped the scales to it being just okay. If you're interested in reading it for yourself, the book is The Would-Be Witch by Kimberly Frost. It has many great reviews on Goodreads.com and Amazon so maybe it's just not my cup of tea. If you read it, let me know your take on it. Here's the Goodreads link: http://bit.ly/WKohgo.
Thankfully, I'm done with that and am moving on to a classic I have never read; The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm pretty darn excited about finally reading this book. I hope you're all doing well and reading some good books this summer! Stay cool and be safe.
SusanXOXO