The Love Spell : An Erotic Memoir of Spiritual Awakening

Product Description

The sequel to the acclaimed memoir Book of Shadows, ready to enchant readers in paperback

This is the true story of a love spell that worked. Ivy League lawyer and Wiccan priestess Phyllis Curott has a super-charged career in law and filmmaking, but one thing is missing: love. She casts a sexy spell and her dream lover soon arrives. But he’s not who he appears to be and there are unforeseen consequences. In this hip, compelling tale of spiritual and sexual awakening, she must seek the aid of an otherworldly suitor, a daemon, to discover how modern relationships and their problems are paths to the greatest magic of all—true love.

This wise and erotic memoir is also rich with spells, potions, techniques of sexual magic, and rituals for love. It is a story that will speak to every woman who has dreamed of her Prince Charming, revealing how our longing for love can lead to the discovery of our innate divinity and an authentic and empowered life.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #707715 in Books
* Published on: 2006-01-05
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 368 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
"I'd been raised to believe that the irrational was illusory, even dangerous," Wiccan high priestess Curott explains. As a 20-something Manhattan law student, she didn't know why she felt a curious connection with a statue of the Libyan Sibyl at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After she started studying with a circle of "women who called themselves Witches," it began to make sense. As a sage named Nonna explained, Curott was being called by her "daemon," who soon materialized as Derek, a sexy visitor to the Wiccan/Pagan bookstore where her circle met. Curott cast a love spell, resulting in hot sex with Derek. Convinced he was her true love, she pushed for a marriage ceremony. Alas, even priestesses schooled in the arts of love can't necessarily keep romantic passion from burning out after a few months. When things fell apart with Derek, Curott tried focusing on self-realization, but she still longed for his love. Nonna dispensed great wisdom—how we confuse love and passion, how we must love ourselves before we love others—but Curott's readers must wait until the last pages for her Mr. Right to arrive. Those curious about contemporary Wiccan beliefs and practices will find this an engrossing introduction, provided they're willing to wade through the occasional discourse on the "journey to wholeness... masculine energies... feminine sensuality" and, naturally, some fairly explicit erotic interludes.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Cross Sex and the City and charmed, and you have Curott's latest autobiographical effort, in which the author of the best-selling Book of Shadows (1998), about her initiation into Wicca, describes how magic came to her aid in finding romance. A high-powered real-estate lawyer in New York, she seemed to have no luck with men until she applied the magic she had learned. Very soon, she met the man of her dreams. Or was he? Even magic didn't work to keep the lovers together, not even the magic of a pagan handfasting ceremony that her rather conservative relatives found a bit disconcerting. At book's end, the marriage is over, and Curott is again sending out love spells; but the rituals and wisdom of her chosen religion have helped her see how important self-awareness and self-acceptance are, whether one is alone or in a couple. The book ends with (no surprise) a series of recipes for love spells that, one fervently wishes, readers will attempt only after absorbing all that Curott has to say. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Back Cover
Praise for The Love Spell:
"Irresistible, The Love Spell offers up the erotic details of the author’s search for a kind of modern woman’s happily-ever-after."
—BODY AND SOUL

"Those curious about contemporary Wiccan beliefs and practices will find this an engrossing introduction."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Customer Reviews

She wants to believe2
I hate to say it, but this seems to be my week for disappointing books, and The Love Spell is, alas, no exception. Why, you ask? For me it's true that, as other reviewers note, the erotic prose can be both turgid and annoyingly coy (if we're going to talk about genitals, let's call them by the names that most people use); that the dialogues between the narrator and her mentor seem rather scripted; that the narrator's self-portrayal does come, after a while, to seem a little one-sided and self-serving (an all-but-inevitable issue of the genre, and the reason I don't publish memoir.) But for me the bigger issue is that of where memoir and fiction butt heads. In this one, the head-butting is especially notable, and especially ironic in a book which is partially about reconciling different poles of energy and experience.

A book whose title includes the word "memoir" opens itself to the fraught nature of its genre, which is, arguably, to tell the truth: maybe to tell it slant, but still to tell it, slant or straight, as truly as the author can. A book in which a marriage disintegrates, and one which ends with an intimation that nonetheless "true love" with a "soul mate" is just a turn of the Ferris wheel away, raises questions in the audience's mind about "what really happened." Never mind that, in issues of marriage, that's something we can't really know: we want some sense, or the illusion of some sense, of what the author THINKS "really happened." So if the memoirist writes about her marriage, maybe she ought to call the guy by his name; if her love spell hasn't, at the time of the writing, brought her what she seeks, maybe she ought to say as much straight out; if there's any possibility that what the narrator seeks is, in fact, impossible or inappropriate--if, in fact, "true love" is only as true as we make it, and the one-and-only "soul mate" is a kind of fiction or shorthand which no relationship can be expected to entirely fulfill, maybe the book ought to show us that in a more direct way.

And this one doesn't do those things. This book is, in an important sense, fiction, in a larger sense that that in which to narrate is to fictionalize. It's fiction because the story veers in some significant particulars from what the authors says, in other, more public venues, "really happened". It's fiction because some of those changes seem to be made to conform to one of the book's theses, that love spells can work (even if not in the expected way) and that "true love" in some kind of absolute, divine sense is possible in mortal relationships. It wouldn't be fiction if the author had found that to be true; but according to some other sources, she hasn't. The author has apparently said in public venues that she dated dozens of men after the breakup of her marriage, and that, although she has at least once lived with a boyfriend since the end of the book-marriage, that "there's always something better" than the relationship you're in. If she's found this "soul mate" for which she yearned so passionately, than which there could be nothing better, she hasn't gone on record saying so. For me, that means this book is fiction, if conditional fiction. I for one would've liked it better if she'd said so.

I say this, too, as one who's very happily married: I'm not knocking the possibility of a love which is immensely fulfilling, sexually satisfying, and (I hope, but the evidence won't be in until either the marriage or the life is over) lifelong. But I do doubt the author's construction of the "true love" which is all things to the lovers: spiritual fulfillment, emotional fusion, family, friendship, adoration and transcendent sex nearly all the time. Marriage is wonderful, but it's neither an apotheosis nor a Hallmark card, or so I've found it; and if it survives, it must do so in the face of the fact that one partner's fulfillment often conflicts violently with the other's. If we're lucky, there's balance in marriage, and there's communication, and there's a mutual willingness to stick it out through the bad times; but there's not usually an all-encompassing emotion that somehow makes those issues go away. It can be magical, but it's not magic in the sense of making all other problems evaporate. It's not for the faint of heart.

I suspect, from the combination of factors I've been mentioning, that Curott has found the same thing; but she won't say so. She claims to have learned something about how to ask, or conjure, appropriately, and how to find the divine love she seeks within herself, but her final chapter shows her still expecting (and promising) emotional transcendence from human love. The book holds out the promise of something absolutely unguarantee-able, a relationship for everyone that fulfills everything. And I think that's fiction. I think Currott knows, at some level, that it's fiction. But she won't say so because, like Agent Mulder, she wants to believe. That's understandable, but ultimately, I think, false. So I'm disappointed in this book; if she'd called it a novel, that would, ironically enough, have been more true.

Book review5
A great read- wonderful mixture of magic and story. Made me feel hopeful and happy by the end. Who knows? It could happen to anyone!

Incredibly boring2
I liked Curott's Book of Shadows enough to attempt this book. I don't know if I'll ever finish it. A little more that halfway through I finally had to admit that I was completely bored, I didn't like anyone in the story, and it was totally obvious how things would turn out anyway. The author comes across as a codependent doormat who pushes her way into a marriage because she liked the idea of being married, not because of her actual relationship. Her lover is terminally selfish and immature. The only reason Curott seems to fall for him is due to physical attraction and sex. As in her previous book, Curott's many friends are so superficially drawn it's impossible to keep straight who is who and what their individual characteristics are. The exception is Nona, who takes the roll of the perfectly enlightened teacher who always has to perfect tidbit of wisdom to impart at the perfect time then she silently withdraws to allow the author to make all her own mistakes. The conversations everyone has are incredibly pedantic and unrealistic. Like others have said, there are a few interesting ideas mixed in here and there, but as the book goes on, they become more and more infrequent. Perhaps if about half the book was edited out, it would be easier to get through.