Book Review: Just Like Magic by Sarah Hogle
January 15, 2025
Okay, so this is a lingering Christmas book that I finished after the new year, but this review is a couple weeks late.
I have never laughed out loud at a book like I laughed at this. I am not sure if I just don’t have a common sense of humor or if this was just exactly my sense of humor, or what, but this was exactly what I needed. This year has been a little on the heavier side, having lost two of my grandmothers in the span of a week, and this was the perfect sweet, hilarious, story that I needed.
We follow the story of Bettie Hughes, a wildly disliked influencer who is doing what she can to scrape by and make money after all of her sponsors have given up on her. She is living in the same town as her grandparents because she is too proud to ask for help, and too broke to move out of the house that she is illegally squatting in. She has no savings left and is barely surviving, when one day, she is feeling particularly bad about herself, she pulls out her record player while guzzling down a bottle of wine. She plays the timeless classic All I Want For Christmas Is You by Christmas icon, Mariah Carey, and happens to accidentally play the song backwards, and in doing so, summons a Holiday Spirit named Hall. He is sugar and spice and everything nice, and she is chaos and, over the course of the book, they grow on each other and help each other grow in ways they didn’t know they could.
I loved this book. I strive to be half as witty and funny as Sarah Hogle and I cannot get enough of her writing. This book was deep and heartfelt as well as wildly funny. Like I said before, I have never laughed so hard at a book before, and I cannot wait to read more from Sarah. I highly suggest this cozy, romanic, Christmas-y book filled with sibling friendship, the love between a grandparent and grandchild, and a romance that develops among the most unlikely of duos.