Daisy Flowers kneels on gravel beside a white marble headstone, pushing her fingers into the earth and talking to it. A bouquet of yellow roses lies on the grave, left by the dead boy’s parents, and she strokes the petals while she reports, brightly, on the couple she paired off at her inn the night before. Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham opens with this one-sided conversation, and it says almost everything about its heroine before the plot gets going: she was there when Michael died, she knows exactly why, and she has decided that cheerfulness is something you do on purpose.
A Heroine Who Smiles on Purpose
The cause of Michael’s death is the first real secret of the novel and it arrives in its first chapter. Two years ago, at the town’s festival, a Souleater attacked the crowd, and Daisy came away marked with a curse that kills anyone she kisses. She kissed her boyfriend minutes later. What she has never told anyone outside her family is the second secret: she is a Souleater too, born able to taste other people’s feelings and tempted every day to take them.
Ingham writes that double guilt with real care. Daisy’s parents run a shop selling remedies made by the very creatures the town burns in effigy each year, and they keep a careful arm’s length from their own daughter. Watching her father kiss her mother’s forehead while she stands there wanting to be held is the loneliest moment in the book, and the cheerful narration never quite covers it. Much of the early charm of Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham lies in that gap between what Daisy says and what she is plainly feeling, and the first-person, present-tense narration lets the reader see both at once. The forced smile is a running joke, and gradually it becomes something closer to a diagnosis, the way a person carrying survivor guilt turns kindness to others into a debt that can never be paid off.
The Gardener Who Digs More Than Flowerbeds
Into this comes Astin, the taciturn handyman who turned up on her doorstep after the attack and never left. The first jolt of Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham comes when a debt collector reveals himself as a Souleater in her sitting room, and the gardener ends the problem with a fireplace poker before calmly asking her to mop the floor. There are, it turns out, other graves out past the fence.
That should make him impossible to love, and the novel is canny about letting him earn it slowly. His sister Olivia died in the same festival attack, drained in his arms, and his hunting is grief turned into a routine. The real turning point is quiet. Sharing a cramped room on the road, he admits he once wanted to be a healer, links his little finger with hers in the dark, and explains why he can no longer bear the colour scarlet. She tells him why wings frighten her. Neither of them mentions it at breakfast. The book understands that tenderness from a closed-off man is most moving when he refuses to acknowledge it afterwards. The slow burn of Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham is built from moments like this one, small admissions made in the dark and then denied by daylight, and it is far more persuasive than the later scenes in which the two of them finally say everything out loud.
The friction is obvious and well used: he would kill her if he knew, and she would rather die than tell him. Their bickering about debts, guests and her taste in furniture keeps the tone light while that question hangs over every scene. Supporting players help, especially Nuri, a cheerful contestant with a belt of knives who keeps mangling the name of Daisy’s kind, and the lanky archer who follows her around with obvious devotion.
Where Too Hexed to Handle Frays
The romance holds; the fantasy plot around it is less steady. The treasure hunt that drives the middle of the book, run by a glamorous self-crowned stranger and full of rival contestants willing to murder for gold, is lively at first. By the closing chapters, though, Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham keeps pausing so that someone can explain centuries of hidden history, and those speeches crowd out the characters the story has worked hard to build.
The tonal range is also wider than the comedy can always carry. Within a few chapters the novel moves from a grim discovery to grief to an explicit love scene, and some of its emotional blows are softened almost as soon as they land. Daisy’s verbal habits, the panicked swearing and the repeated insistence that she is fine, wear thin by the second half. Most strikingly, a character guilty of terrible cruelty is forgiven with a speed the book never quite justifies, and the hero’s own record of killing is waved through in a sentence or two. Readers should also know the sex is on the page and fairly frank. The darker material, which takes in violent death, captivity, coercive control, bereavement and persecution, sits alongside the jokes without much warning.
The Writer Behind Too Hexed to Handle
Charlotte Ingham arrived with A Match Made in Hell in 2025, a romantic comedy in which a young woman wakes up dead and strikes a bargain with the ruler of a hellish underworld. This second novel is unconnected to it, a complete story with its own world and a firmly closed ending. Its dedication is a small joke for genre readers, offered to every innkeeper who has ever had only one bed left, and the acknowledgements admit the book was drafted from little more than a loose idea, which may explain why its lore keeps being rebuilt in the final stretch. Read beside the debut, Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham shows a writer settling into a recognisable formula: a heroine with a death-shaped problem, a forbidding love interest, and a supernatural rulebook that bends to let them be together.
Hot Key Books published it in Britain in September 2026. The American edition comes from Scarlett Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint, and is due on 23 February 2027.
Readers who enjoy witches pulled between duty and desire might move from here to The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling, whose curse is played for warmer, lower-stakes laughs, or return to Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, the classic about women whose gifts make love dangerous for the men who fall for them.
Final Thoughts
Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham is at its best in small rooms: a graveside, a narrow bed, a stable with an opinionated donkey. When it widens into battles and grand revelations, it loses some of what makes it distinctive. What remains is a funny, sincere romance about a woman who has spent two years being kind to everyone except herself.
It takes her the whole book to stop apologising for what she is.