Well, it's not a complete waste of time, but I'm glad that I didn't pay for this. It is fine. ( )

Arin Murphy-Hiscock has an intelligent, straight-forward style that I really appreciate. She has some interesting ideas that I'm looking forward to trying. ( )

This is a charming little book that frames self-care in terms of witchery. The subtitle: Magical Ways to Pamper, Soothe, and Care for Your Body and Spirit. It delivers as advertised. I am just starting my spiritual exploration and have been struggling for quite a long while to engage in self-care. I thought this book might be an engaging way to push over two tile cascades (dominoes FTW!).

It's divided into 5 chapters: self-care and magic, mental and emotional self-care, physical self-care, spiritual self-care, and household self-care, bookended by the introduction, bibliography, and index. It's got kind, compassionate advice and suggestions for developing habits to build self-esteem, reduce stress, and bring meaning into daily life. And lots of recipes! For personal care products, food, teas, aromatherapy blends, incense, craft projects. And spells/rituals, which are basically recipes with a spiritual dimension, to go along with an assortment of mindfulness practices. My only frustration with the book is that all of these recipes and rituals call for an assortment of materials, and it would have been nice to have included those in the index. Instead, I added sticky notes to the inside cover creating ad hoc indices for stones, oils, herbs, and incense ingredients. Based on these, the most useful items are bergamot, clear quartz, frankincense, jasmine, lavender, rose quartz, sandalwood, ylang ylang, and rose. Plus, lots of different colors of candles.

This is a very hands-on book that offers lots of things to try out. I've already started doing some of them and look forward to trying out more. The food recipes are probably the least interesting to me as I already have an extensive cookbook collection and am very comfortable with feeding the body--I really need help with feeding the soul. Hopefully, this little guide will continue to nudge me toward more intentional daily practices. It might help you too, or at least give you ideas to think about. ( )

Honestly, this book very much missed the mark for me. It definitely felt very tweeny.

Whilst the advice it was pushing wasn't harmful in anyway, unlike a lot of messages teenage girls are absorbing, there seemed to be very little that was novel, or explored in a particularly meaningful or interesting way.

This book could have had so much potential to really explore various avenues of mythology, pagan practices or alternative healing, but almost everything I read seemed as though it was taken from any women's or teenage girls' magazine, with a few added sage leaves, or cantations. I think if it had given these some grounding, such as practices' historical, or geographical roots, or even just accompanied them with a slight narrative it might have appealed to a more mature or discerning audience. ( )