Practical Prosperity Magick by Ellen Dugan

Netgalley gave me Practical Prosperity Magick: Crafting Success & Abundance by Ellen Dugan. In it, Dugan guides the reader through spells for prosperity magick with personal commentary to make it more personal. However, I think she oversteps the boundaries between book and author. She will go off on tangents, for instance, in the section about charms she goes on to describe all of her (non)magickal charms one-by-one, there being no relevance to the rest of the book. She could have condensed that easily to one sentence or two. It did nothing to benefit the book. 

When she describes her spells she does so in great detail, mentioning the importance of the moon and the day of the week for each spell. She gives ingredients and step-by-step instructions which are more than suitable. Not being a witch myself, but very interested in pursuing that lifestyle, I can only assume the spells are legitimate. I will be trying one or two and will update my review. But I feel that my review of this book is still solid even without trying her spells.

 She does something interesting, she explains Personal Magickal Energy Total (PME) and will occasionally check on the reader to make sure that our magickal powers are up to par for the spell. Dugan defines PME as representing the "amount of thought, effort, style and power that you put into the stalled prosperity spell when you first cast it." For a witch to scan herself, this information was very important.

The spells are simple enough for a beginner. That being said, she does not give an introduction on how one becomes a witch or if a person, like myself who has no experience but is very interested in magick, can cast these spells.  I was quite pleased to find that she teaches us a bit about the Law of Attraction, one of my personal favorite new age ideas. Also, Dugan often calls upon her knowledge of plants to help the reader cast the spells. That is a part of the author that is useful to the rest of the book.

 Overall, I’m giving this book three stars because I do not think all of the personal anecdotes were beneficial to the reader and because there was not enough background information for someone semi-new to witchcraft. The book would have been much more useful as instructional material if she had stuck to witchcraft and inserted less of herself unnecessarily. But this is a good book for the beginner new to spells, but not necessarily new to witchcraft.