DNF at 34%. I really wanted to like this book. The premise was interesting: Delilah is a young witch whose family was long ago cursed that should anyone fall in love with them, the lover will forget them. It's all very sad. Add in that, upon reaching the age of 18, all witches must undergo The Calling, a bespoke test that determines whether or not you'll be allowed to keep your magic. Obviously, the Calling she suggests is breaking her family curse, especially since her father is a renowned curse breaker, and then it's hijacked by Kieran Pelumbra, member of a very rich, influential family with a lot of secrets. One of those is that, every generation, a pair of Pelumbra twins are born, cursed that one will slowly drain away the other's life force until, well, something terrible happens. It's all a big secret and would be a huge scandal if it got out. Kieran would like to get it out because, well, this is going to kill him. So he takes Delilah off on a quest to first find his twin, an obnoxious, asocial girl named Brier, and put the pieces together before time runs out, or his family catches them.
See? It sounds cool. They even get around via airship. However, I found it...really boring. I could not get invested in any of the main characters. The stakes were life and death (and Delilah's magic) and I just could not care. The characters were so flat. Kieran's only personality trait was naive optimism, Delilah was somehow even flatter, and Brier was the most interesting at mean and antisocial. On top of this, Cottingham was trying to sell a romance between Delilah and Brier? I was not going to stick around and watch that continue to unfold.
Shame. Very intriguing premise, unspectacular execution.

When a witch comes of age, they must complete a Calling to prove their skill. If they succeed, they become a licensed witch. If they fail, they are stripped of their magic. Delilah intends to use her Calling as a chance to break her family curse. Bea women never find love, because when feelings start to grow, their men forget all about them. Just as she is about to set out, Kieran shows up and hijacks her Calling, asking her to break his curse instead. He and his twin are doomed. One is draining the other of their magic and is cursed to become a monster. Together Delilah and Kieran set out to find Briar, his twin, and to bring an end to the Pelumbra curse. The two girls get off on the wrong foot, but there is something about Briar that Delilah can't ignore.

Read if you like:
-Coming of Age Stories
-Frist Love
-Magic and Curses
-Found Family

I really enjoyed Practical Rules for Cursed Witches. It was vaguely reminiscent of several movies and TV shows I enjoyed growing up without being too close to them that it felt like a carbon copy. Kayla Cottingham has filled with pages with a lovely supporting cast of characters to build a wonderful found family for Kieran. They seamlessly adopt Delilah and Briar as the story progresses. I also enjoyed the romance between Delilah and Briar. They both dealt with their fears and found a happily ever after. The quest took readers across the kingdom to a number of unique locations.

The only thing that kept me from giving this book five stars was that I was never fully clear on the look and feel of the setting. Was it fantasy? Steampunk? Historical? Modern? I couldn't place it. Eventually I just gave up and focused on the characters.

Thank you! Just downloaded and will read asap! Final review will be shared on scheduled tour date with TBR and Beyond for book tour!

Review will be posted on instagram, Goodreads, and Amazon.

Thanks to NetGalley & Random House Children's for the early copy in exchange for an honest review. Sadly, I DNF'ed at 20%.

I thought the worldbuilding was rushed and messy. The characters were also rushed and I was having a hard time getting emotionally invested. Kieran was incredibly dull and I don't generally like "rich boy" characters either.

Practical Rules for Cursed Witches offers an intriguing premise with its mix of family curses, magic, and a slow-burn romance. Still, it falls short of fully delivering on its potential. The story follows Delilah Bea, a witch with a complicated family history and an even more complex love life, as she navigates the challenges of breaking her family's curse and that of the powerful Pelumbra family.

The novel excels in its world-building. Cottingham creates a magical landscape that's richly detailed and filled with interesting lore, particularly regarding the curses that drive the plot. The tension between Delilah and the Pelumbra twins, Kieran and Briar, is palpable, adding layers to the narrative as they attempt to break the generational curse that threatens their lives.

However, the book suffers from uneven pacing. The first half is engaging, with plenty of action and intrigue, but the second half drags as the story becomes bogged down in unnecessary subplots. Delilah's growing attraction to Briar is a highlight, but it feels underdeveloped and somewhat rushed, especially given its weight in the narrative.

Character development is another area where the book could have shined more. While Delilah is a likable protagonist with clear motivations, the secondary characters, particularly Kieran, come across as one-dimensional. The dynamic between the twins, which should have been a focal point, often feels overshadowed by the romance subplot, leaving Kieran in the background.

In the end, Practical Rules for Cursed Witches is a decent read for fans of supernatural romance, but it doesn't quite rise above the standard tropes of the genre. It’s enjoyable enough for those looking for a light fantasy with a touch of romance, but it may leave readers wanting more depth and stronger character arcs.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children’s for providing me with this arc! This is my second book from this author (getting to My Dearest Darkest soon!) and I wasn’t disappointed. I absolutely loved This Delicious Death, so I had high hopes for this cozy fantasy, that it definitely met.

Although this author mainly writes YA Horror, this YA Cozy Fantasy worked so well. To me, this seems like a drastic genre jump for an author, but Kayla Cottingham has managed to do so with grace and much success.

Thank you NetGalley and Kayla Cottingham for the ARC of Partial Rules for Cursed Witches! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this!! It was a cute cozy witchy ya and was the perfect book to get ready for the fall season!

I had so much fun reading this book! It had everything I wanted for a cozy fun fall read. Adventure, magic, betrayal, good versus evil. If you love Charmed or Practical Magic, you'll want to read this book.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Practical Rules for Cursed Witches by Kayla Cottingham is a third person-POV YA Sapphic romantic fantasy. Delilah is a young witch getting ready for her Calling, which will give her six months to fulfill a task or have her magic taken away forever. Delilah states her Calling will be breaking her family’s curse, only for Kieran, the son of a wealthy family, to assert a rite for Delilah to break his curse instead.

What I really liked was how we have two different curses going that both lead us to Briar, Kieran’s twin sister who hasn’t seen Kieran in years. Their family curse is slowly killing Kieran by siphoning his magic into Briar. Delilah’s family curse, meanwhile, is that anyone who falls in love with a member of her family will forget everything about them. Delilah and Briar initially have a lot of struggles and don’t really get along, but slowly start developing feelings for each other as Briar’s more gruff layers get peeled back and Delilah opens up further.

Briar was my favorite character. She’s completely uninterested in conforming to anyone’s ideas of a girl born into high society, femininity, being a teen, anything. She won't eat vegetables, she has a shaved head, she’s claustrophobic and needs a big room to accommodate her. In other words, she’s complex and pushes back against any societal standards for female love interests. The cherry on top is that she is quite short while Delilah is very tall, which creates the beloved trope of the tall, more reserved character forming a couple with the fiester, short character and we get the whole romance from the tall character’s POV. Usually, in M x F romances, the POV is either dual or from the woman’s, who is usually shorter. It’s a nice change of pace for a very popular dynamic.

The worldbuilding was sort of Kiki’s Delivery Service where there is one witch in small towns and witches indeed to fulfill a task before becoming a full witch. This plus the baking and the sweeter aspects of the romance all contributed to a cozier atmosphere versus the epic stakes that are more common in YA fantasy. The life and death stakes for Kieran and the ability to find a love long-term for Delilah will still satisfy readers who want something in between a cozy and an epic but still leans cozier.

I would recommend this to fans of cozy fantasy looking for a YA novel, readers of romantic fantasy looking for a story about curses, and those looking for a Sapphic romance arc with a height difference.

Thank you to @netgalley and Random House for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Well that was just cozy and truly delightful! I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I did when I picked it up but what a delight that was. I could of course be nitpicky and point out a couple of little plot holes and some weird pacing on occasion, the moments where some steampunk elements seemed incongruous with the rest of the story (Kieran on a corded phone talking with his crush? Really?) but there are such tiny moments compared to how much joy I got from reading this adorable delightful cozy sapphic fantasy that I’d rather just leave this review with how pleased I am I got to experience this world. I would love to see more in this particular universe- the rules of magic built into this story leave it open for so many other amazing stories that could be developed in this universe!

A cute, cozy story full of witches and magic? What’s not to love? I only wish I had waited to read this one until spooky season so I could really feel the vibes. Our MMC, Delilah, is so fun and witty I just loved following her story and watching her try and break another family’s curse.

If you’re in the mood for a sapphic, witchy book just in time for fall, this one is it! Thank you NetGalley and Delacorte Press for giving me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Practical Rules for Cursed Witches is not a book you should use if you need to break your curse. You will need different help for that. This is a creative universe with witches and curses and air ships. An 18 Year old witch named Delilah must pass a test known as a calling in order to be allowed to practice magic. A handsome boy asks her to help him rid his family of a curse that is draining him of his magic and slowly killing him.
The story focuses on love, friendship and found family. Delilah and her new friends find love and magic as they travel across their county to break their curses. They face a lot of danger, some from family and some of which is the risk we all take when we share our feelings for another.
The characters in the book all fear rejection yet they all yearn to find a person who will accept them for who they are.
Thank you NetGalley, Kayla Cottingham, and Random House Children's | Delacorte Press

This book really provided the cozy fantasy vibes I was after from page one. I loved the found family and the “Calling” adventure, as well as the creativity and colorfulness of this world. I also really appreciated the casual queerness, and the displays of many different kinds of love, whether it be romantic, platonic, or familial.

DNF at 20%.
I was expecting to be so thoroughly drawn in immediately, as I was with This Delicious Death by the same author. The first 14% was an info dump, mixed with a random declaration of love. The plot was jumping from a magic lesson to a birthday party, the declaration of love, the main character running away from the party, the main character and her mother falling asleep and waking up the next day, only to be immediately thrust into the Calling ceremony, where Delilah sets out to break the curse placed on the women of her family, and have her plans crushed by a stranger using her to break his own curse. Normally, the idea of a twin curse is extremely intriguing. This one was more of an info dump, no actual compelling storyline was used to explain the twin curse that Delilah has to now break for a stranger, all within six months if she wants to keep her magic.
Overall, I was underwhelmed, and that was beyond disappointing due to my high hopes for the story.

ARC provided by Netgalley.

Practical Rules for Cursed Witches is so cute and cozy. I recommend this book if you enjoy stories about witches, fantasy, and found family.

The Honey Witch meets Beauty and the Beast. There were a lot of elements added into this fantasy world, including steampunk type airships, magic ley lines. witch councils and powerful wealth imbalances. In a lot of ways the worldbuilding reminds me of The Spellshop, though I probably have more unanswered questions about the details of how a number of things work in this universe.

We follow Delilah, who is cursed, in her journey to break another curse on a set of twins, with the help of additionally cursed characters. Curses abound! The enemies to lovers storyline reminded me a lot of The Honey Witch (though obviously not adult). I enjoyed the various types of magic each witch could do and how varied it was. I wish there had been a little more skill/witchcraft involved in curse breaking, as that seems to be a major element of the story & several characters’ profession and yet we didn’t really learn any methods of breaking curses other than reading them & following their clear instructions, which it doesn’t seem like you’d even need to be a witch to do. So how is curse breaking a profession?

Anyway, this cozy fantasy balances high stakes without being overly stressful or action packed, coming to a sweet resolution.

This book was just not really what i enjoy reading. It felt a little too young adult and I found the FMC really annoying and ‘pick me’

I loved the story, the world building and meeting the different characters. I felt completely immersed in the story and couldn't stop reading it.

Delilah Bea is no stranger to magic: her absentee father is the world’s most famous cursebreaker, and all the women in her family are fated to never find true love. Delilah plans to use her magical Calling to break the Bea family curse but is instead tapped to break the curse of the Pelumbra twins. In their powerful family, one pair of twins every generation is doomed to have one twin drain the other of life and magic. Kieran Pelumbra is growing weaker as his twin sister Briar grows stronger and monstrous. Setting out together to break the curse, it's soon apparent that others in the family don't want the curse broken. Delilah is also drawn to Briar. Time is running out for the twins, and Delilah has her own curse to bear.

This world is full of magic, with curses, blessings, and geasa commonplace. Witches must take part in a Calling to prove themselves worthy of their magic; if they fail, their magic is sealed away. Delilah has six months to complete her task, which is complicated by the fact that no one knows the actual wording of the curse itself. Kieran tracks down Briar, who has been on the run for months, and they go from place to place looking for clues about the curse. The Pelumbra family has grown prosperous over the generations, and it's due to the twins and the curse that haunts them.

As the team travels around, Kieran gets a chance to see more of the world than the estate he was kept in, Briar gets a chance to be something other than a curse repository, and Delilah grows up and faces herself as well as the legacy of her father. We eventually find out what the curse actually is, as well as the curse on the Bea family. Not everything is what they thought it was, and I enjoyed the showdown at the end, and the hint of happily-ever-after endings for our main cast. A fun book I couldn't put down.

This was pretty cute, loved the found family and characters and relationships, didn't love the emphasis on love healing all (especially when it was all romantic love that I can think of) but ah well.