Bad Luck Charm (Witch City, #1)

by Julie Johnson

When you’re a kid, you think by the time you’re an adult, you’ll have it all figured out. Life, that is. As though you’ll turn eighteen and, with the simple flip of a calendar page, be somehow better equipped to handle everything that the world throws at you. Of course, when you actually turn eighteen, you realize pretty quickly that you’re just as much of an idiot kid as you were at eight — albeit with slightly better sense of style and slightly worse taste in men. But surely, you tell yourself, you’ll have it figured out by twenty-one. Old enough to legally drink. A whole year outside of your teenage wasteland. And yet, twenty-one feels just as overwhelming as ever. Twenty-two is even worse. Twenty-three offers no further enlightenment. As you slowly begin the march toward twenty-five — halfway through the defining decade of your life — you begin to accept the truth. There is no age at which you’ll ever have it figured out; no magic number where every missing piece falls abruptly into place. You will get older, there’s no stopping that, but there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get wiser. If anything, you merely get better at pretending. Acting like you have all the answers, holding all the loose threads of your life together in one fist, so they resemble a rope strong enough to guide you along until your time on earth expires.