lenyberry

 
Neeeewww books! I’ve given them both a flip-through and I think they’re both going to end up being quite useful for me.

I wrote up reviews but did A Stupid in trying to format and accidentally deleted them, and don’t have brainpower for rewriting the whole thing. The TL;DR was basically Pestlework is fab and I uncritically recommend it to anyone who wants to make magical powders to boost their spellwork, beginner or advanced practitioners alike (though the oils section feels a bit like an afterthought and is much less thoroughly-explained, the powders section justifies the cost of the book on its own). Magical Oils is… sorta ok, but contains multiple uses of “g*psy” as well as kiiinda being culturally-appropriative in places (voodoo & chakras). The recipes aren’t as easy to follow nor as well-explained in purpose, but there are a lot of them and if you like having a ton of options like I do, that’s a major plus. I probably wouldn’t particularly recommend it for new beginners just because I feel like it would be unnecessarily confusing with both the strange way they’ve done they recipes and the lack of explanation of each formula, and I can’t recommend it uncritically for more advanced practitioners either due to the casual slurs and appropriation, but if you can read it with discernment it’s quite likely you can find a decent amount of valuable information nonetheless. I’ll definitely use it as a reference but I suspect I’m probably gonna mostly use it for concept-inspiration rather than following the recipes exactly.