2023 fantasy-romance, first of a series. The world is much like our
own, only it has witches in it. Kay had a teenage crush on Harry
Ashworth, but he dropped her with an unfriendly note. Now they're
thrown together on a journey across Europe.
As with the later Careful What You Witch For, there's a fair
bit more going on than just the inevitable romance. Kay's magic is
unreliable; Harry, though less of a viewpoint character, has problems
of his own. But both of these will be resolved essentially by the
progress of the romance, where in the sequel they're more separated.
There's also rather less world-building, surprising for the first of a
series. Mostly this is about Kay and Harry coming to terms with their
continuing mutual attraction, with some incidental magic. I confess I
was expecting the Big Reason why Kay came to hate Harry to have been a
misunderstanding, but it turned out he did mean to be that
hurtful—and even if he was being a teenage idiot at the time, I found
that rather harder to forgive than Kay does.
Still, the things I liked in the sequel are still there: real
characters even if they do tropey things, real problems even if the
romance mostly sweeps them up in its resolution, and at least a bit of
real world-building rather than just pasting in magic and expecting
the world to stay the same.