Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie She’s Dead

Written by: Christiana Miller
Pages: 332
A little magic can go a long way — to really screwing up a girl’s life!

Mara is having the worst month of her life. At least, that’s what her cards tell her and they’ve never been wrong. She’s evicted from her apartment, loses her job and is banned from Beverly Hills. So when the tarot cards predict her imminent demise, she uses a little magic to make her world right.

Suddenly, an aunt she’s never met dies, leaving Mara as her sole heir. But when Mara moves into her inherited home, she discovers Aunt Tillie never moved out. She’s still one pissed-off old lady, even post-mortem, and she blames Mara’s magical meddling for her death.

When Mara accidentally releases a demon and awakens the spirit of the most powerful witch in history, Tillie’s ready to kill her — literally. It’s the only way she can think of to save the girl from herself. The witch and the demon, however, have other plans for Mara’s body

I picked this book up for free from Amazon this summer and read it in my Kindle App. I honestly didn’t know if it would turn out rubbish or fantastic since it was a freebie.

Happily, I ended up enjoying this book.  It started off a wee bit Poe-level of depressing. The main character is evicted, she’s jobless, and her aunt dies. I suppose bad things come in threes and well, there you go. It didn’t get much better as she moves to the home she inherits from dearly departed Aunt Tillie, who’s still haunting the place poltergeist style.

What’s a girl to do? She tries to fight back but gets in way over her head. Ahhh it’s not a true chick-lit book if the main girl didn’t get in over her head, right?

I definitely didn’t like some of the language in the book. It was like you went along fine and then boom, swear word. And then there was this ghost lust-object that took the story for a bit of a turn that I could have most certainly lived without. That’s just not my scene and I don’t know that it really added much to the story. The good thing is that the main character definitely wasn’t a fan any more than I.

I think my favorite part was that this gal owned a creepy poisonous toad. That toad had swagger. I wish there was more toad-lovin’ in the book. I don’t know why, but I like zany animal characters. I blame Janet Evanovich books. On that note, a semi-living house was a nifty touch to the book. The town tall tale is that the house turned a former townie into a tree and this kind-hearted main character tries to take care of it. A house that can turn a man into a tree is definitely not a house you want to mess with.

All in all, not a bad freebie book at all. Glad I tried it out. I really hope that some of my other summer freebies I loaded up on thanks to Amazon sales turn out good like this one.

–Lady O