Meet Lola Garnett, a bored housewife, mom and office drone who wakes up with unexpected psychic abilities, and no instruction manual, and Twink, the reluctant, sarcastic fairy assigned to assist and educate her.

In this first book in a series, middle-aged Lola has resigned herself to an unsatisfying life of servitude as a wife, mother and office drone. The American Dream she's living feels more like a coma, and she secretly longs for a more meaningful life. In a perfect demonstration of "be careful what you wish for…" she gets her wish when she wakes up from a nap one day with extrasensory abilities and powers.

The adventure really kicks into gear once she learns that her condition is the result of a botched spell coming from across the street, where her wanna-be-witch neighbor, Melinda Underwood, is foolishly playing with powers she doesn't understand. Lola’s untrained intuition tells her that Melinda intends to use her equal, yet opposite, powers for evil against innocent people.

With the help of a tiny, sarcastic, ethereal sidekick, can Lola overcome her helpless resignation to overthrow Melinda's evil plot and, while she's at it, find her own self worth?

ADVANCE PRAISE

Make no mistake about it, Be Careful What You Witch For! is NOT your Grandmothers’ witch story. It is author Lisa Bonnice’s very funny, extremely touching and yes, spiritually enlightening view of an incredibly relatable woman who finds herself thrust into an incredibly fascinating world. A world that, up until now, I not only knew very little about, but thanks to Lisa’s creative genius, (and at the risk of dangling a preposition or two) one that I would absolutely love to become a part of. But then with botched spells, sarcastic fairies and neighbors that make Gladys Kravits look like Marcia Brady jumping off every page, who wouldn’t? I loved this book and so will you. Kudos Lisa, I for one was spellbound!

Marguerite Manning
Llewellyn’s Bestselling author of
Cosmic Karma, Understanding Your Contract with the Universe

Lisa Bonnice is the New Age's answer to David Sedaris. If you don’t like identifying with someone’s journey; if you don’t like getting a fuller understanding of the self-empowerment process; if you don’t like reading a story so compelling that the pages seem to turn themselves, then PUT THIS BOOK DOWN IMMEDIATELY! Even touching it could have been good for you. You will make new friends in these pages. You won’t put it down willingly. You may even learn something of enlightenment and self-empowerment. Put Be Careful What You Witch For! on your library shelf; you’ll want to come back to it time and time again.

Curtis Folts
Psychic, Radio show host
www.archmessenger.com

I loved this book. It is packed with identifiable characters, playfulness, and an emphasis on social consciousness. I laughed out loud at the witty, sometimes sarcastic, dialogue and was intrigued by the metaphysical lessons artfully woven throughout this imaginative story. Be Careful What You Witch For! is an enchanted fairy tale with an irreverent, adult edge that will leave you wanting more. Lisa Bonnice creatively combines the humor of Elizabeth Gilbert, the metaphysical knowledge of Deepak Chopra, and the storytelling ability of JK Rowling. Once you start reading you will not want to put it down.

Elizabeth Anne Hill
Twin Souls: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium;
co-creator of An Interview with the Universe

READERS RAVE!

By Donna Corso
Personal assistant to Neale Donald Walsch

So, I sat down one day last week and picked up your book and got so drawn into the story that I could barely put it down. I loved it!!! You are a wonderful writer, have great humor and a very engaging style. (And I love books that have short chapters too!!) Congratulations! 

By Trudy "Bel" Bowler

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put it down
I love this book. Lisa Bonnice has managed to address the fears of anyone who is exploring their own abilities for the first time and give us the ability to laugh at ourselves and then step back and look a little deeper into our own souls.

Written with humor and depth. This is a must read for anyone who is looking for that great "bathtub book" or a good reason to curl up with a warm blanket and a hot cup of coffee. You will find yourself laughing not only at Lola but also at yourself as Lola bumbles through as many of us really have done in exploring our own paths. While the book has some moments of comedic genuis but when you finish the book and find yourself missing the characters, you will also find that there were some wonderful life lessons along the way.

By Clark Rogers

FANTASTIC STORYTELLING!!!!!
From the moment I jumped into Chapter One of "Be Careful What You Witch For!" ... until I read the very last page, I was hooked on your easy-to-read suspense-riddled mystery-and-mayhem filled-with-laughs thrill ride! Very few books have I cranked out a full read in... roughly 24 hours ... but yours is one I'm proud to say I couldn't put down and thoroughly enjoyed!

I haven’t written in a diary for almost twenty years, since I was a teenager, but I think it might be a good idea to start typing a journal before I lose track of everything that has happened. It’s getting too complicated to keep up with. I type about a hundred words per minute (one of the few advantages of working as a secretary … excuse me … executive assistant), so it will be a lot faster than writing this out by hand. Besides, I can’t read my own writing half the time.

And, even though my memory can be very sharp … I can summon up the most picayune details of things I’ll never need to recall … I can also forget important things quickly sometimes. So, it would be wise for me to log this stuff as it’s happening.

For example, I can vividly remember an incident that happened when I was six years old, suffering from an ear infection and a high fever that left me bed-ridden for several days. There was even talk of surgery to remove my adenoids, I was so sick. One morning, during that illness, my mom made breakfast (bacon, eggs, toast, etc.) while I entertained myself with my toy makeup kit, which included a bottle of so-called “perfume” … sweet and cloying, and disgusting to an adult’s olfactory sensibilities. While the house still smelled of frying bacon, and with the scent of this awful perfume still lingering in my nose, my sinuses slammed shut and stayed that way for a week. I was stuck with that god-awful mixture of odors in my head the whole time I was sick, so I was nauseated the entire time as well.

I can vividly remember useless information like the stench of that perfume and bacon combo. Just writing about it here brings it intensely to mind … I can smell it now and it makes me queasy. But ask me the name of an important client, or my family’s birthdays and I’ll stare at you like Michigan J. Frog and only croak out a single, “Ribbet.”

So that’s why I’ve created you, a Microsoft Word document, to be my virtual BFF and confidant, to listen as I ramble and rant, and to help me keep track of this strange tale.

Therefore, here I sit at my keyboard in my second-floor home office (actually, it’s just an unused third bedroom with a desk for my laptop, my grandmother’s antique rocking chair and an ancient wrought iron stand that holds our old TV), with a bird’s eye view of Melinda’s house, logging my bizarre story as it unfolds. With apologies to Mr. Rusk, my favorite high school English teacher, I’m not going to worry about perfect grammar and syntax. I’m going to type this as it flows. Otherwise, I’ll waste too much time second guessing myself.

These psychic events, I guess you would call them, the reasons I’m even sitting here writing, have been going on for about a month. I hoped they would stop but they’re just getting stranger and scarier. (It occurs to me that it might also be a good idea to keep a journal so they have something to read when they lock me up. They’ll be able to track the downward spiral of one Lola Garnett.)

That’s me, Lola, short for Dolores. Why my parents chose to hang a handle like that on me I don’t understand. I always hated the name Dolores because it makes me sound like an old lady. Plus, if you look it up, you’ll see that it means suffering and sorrow. Why would anyone wish that on a kid?

“Lola” at least sounds like the person I’d like to be ... fun, festive and flirty. The reality of me isn’t quite so exciting, but at least a sexy name like Lola beats the snot out of Dolores and lets me occasionally pretend I could be a showgirl at the Copacabana if I wanted to.

Instead, I live a fairly dull life in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. I work as a secretary (pardonez moi, executive assistant) at a welding supplies company in Cleveland Heights. This is not what I longed to be when I grew up ... I never actually had any big dreams, beyond marrying Scott Baio … so this is what I ended up with. It’s dull, but it pays the bills. I dress up like a grownup every day, in boring business casual clothes, but can’t wait to get home so I can tear off the elastic and underwires and put on something comfy, like my sweats and bunny slippers.

I’m married to my high school sweetheart, Chuck. We didn’t get married straight out of high school … we both dated around some before we decided that we got it right the first time and made it permanent, in our mid-twenties. Chuck is a contractor. He owns his own tile installation business in Mayfield Heights. That’s not what he intended to be when he grew up, either, it sort of just happened, by accident.

When we moved into our first home, we kept getting phone calls from people asking about having tile work done. After weeks of telling these people they had the wrong number, that we had just moved here and this was a new phone number for us, Chuck finally asked one of them where they were getting the phone number from. It wasn’t listed in the Yellow Pages under “Tile Installation” … we looked. The caller told Chuck that there was a sign on a pole at the corner of North and High streets.

Chuck drove to that intersection to check it out and found a small sign, handwritten on cardboard with a Sharpie, attached to the pole. I would certainly never employ anyone who only bothered to scrawl out a sign similar to “Will work for food” to perform fairly involved work in my home and sanctuary, but apparently all of these other people would, because our phone was ringing off the hook!

Inspiration struck my industrious man. Chuck was working as a shipping and receiving clerk and hated it, so he took this, literally, as a sign from God. He took an hour-long class at one of the big hardware store chains and learned the basics of how-to install tile. For the first year or so, he clumsily bullshitted his way through small tile jobs, like bathroom floors and tubs, until he learned how to really do it right and eventually take on the big, industrial jobs.

Before too long, he got his license and now he has a dozen or so employees of his own. Now that he’s reached this point, I think it’s a funny story that shows a lot of initiative on his part, but at the time I was terrified that someone would bust him for being an unlicensed fraud. He, apparently, never thought of himself that way, so he got away with it and grew into a legitimate business owner … one who works too many hours.

This leaves me to deal, most of the time, with our teenaged daughter, Amanda. She’s at that borderline age (fifteen) where she’s ashamed to be seen with her parents most of the time, but not so proud that she won’t be seen with us at the mall buying clothes for her.

She is too skinny, in my opinion, but at least she eats (boy, does she eat!). She’s fortunate enough to be genetically blessed, unlike me, with my chunky ass and thighs. Oh sure, to look at me you’d think I’m thin enough but, without clothes, I’m a mess. I hate my body and wish that plastic surgery wasn’t such a vain and risky proposition.

Thank God Amanda doesn’t have an eating disorder. I know she doesn’t, because I’ve paid attention. I’ve tried to teach her to have good self-esteem about her body, and it hasn’t been easy, considering how lousy I feel about my own. It makes me mad that we parents even have to be concerned about this type of thing, with all the pressure girls feel to look the way Amanda looks, naturally. I wouldn’t be a teenaged girl these days for all the money in the world.

Of course, being the parent of a teenaged girl these days isn’t very easy, either. I adore Amanda, but at this age, she’s barely bearable. I miss my little girl, my baby. I miss the old days when she still looked up to me and wanted to spend time with me, when she still wanted me to help pick out her clothes and do her hair. But now, I have to admit that I cannot wait until she turns eighteen. Chuck and I are both counting the days.

Anyway, looking back, I think I can pinpoint when the weird stuff started happening. I am pretty sure it was that weekend that Amanda tried to get me to do her homework for her. She was supposed to watch the DVD of the movie Gandhi for her history class and then write a report.

Must be nice, right? When I was in school, back in the Stone Age, we had to open a book once in a while! Why her teacher isn’t making them read Gandhi’s autobiography I’ll never know. I guess maybe teachers find it hard enough to make a class full of fifteen-year-olds stop texting each other long enough to pay attention for an hour, much less read about some “… old, dead dude from India,” as Amanda called him. Reminded me of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and I’m not thrilled that my only child is emulating Ted “Theodore” Logan.

Amanda brought home a Gandhi DVD from school, saying she thinks I’ll “really enjoy it.” She says a friend lent it to her and it sounded like it was more up my alley than hers. She said, “Here, Mom, why don’t you watch this and let me know what you think?”

The deception begins.

I’ll admit that I’ve always wanted to watch the movie. It’s one of those that I’ve always felt a little guilty about not seeing, like Out of Africa and the French Lieutenant’s Woman. Those are the movies that older people raved about while I was busy watching Ferris Beuller’s Day Off or the aforementioned Bill and Ted. So I suggested to Amanda that we watch it together. I told her I’d make some popcorn and we could make an afternoon of it.

No, she reminds me, she has plans all weekend. This is the weekend she and her girlfriends were planning to spend at Kristen’s dad’s cabin. I guess I’m watching it alone, I tell her.

Well, it’s not like I had anything else planned over the weekend, other than the never ending housework that awaits me after a week of nine-to-five idiocy. It’s not like Chuck would care that we have the whole place to ourselves for the first time in months. The idea of doing it in every room in the house, any time we’re alone, flew out of his head right around the time he watched a football-sized baby squeeze its way out of my formerly unspoiled girly bits.

I shouldn’t say that, I guess. Chuck is a great guy, and I’m still happy we got married. He’s a better dad than most, and he makes a decent living. Unfortunately, he plays a better Oscar Madison than Jack Klugman, and I’m no Felix Unger. I neither have the time nor the interest in picking up after a grown man.

And maybe, if I’m being honest, that’s pretty much why I stopped caring about doing it in any room every chance we got. Once I became a housewife and office drone, I lost my will to get up in the morning, much less to play the sexual temptress. No, I’m not suicidal; perhaps I’m being a tad dramatic. I get that way sometimes.

But seriously, I just hate cleaning the house and doing the laundry and cooking the dinner and doing the dishes and on and on, ad nauseum, especially since it just has to be done again tomorrow and the next day, and the next ... kinda takes the edge off of one’s libido, scrubbing lover boy’s shit off the toilet and picking up his crunchy socks for the umpteenth time.

Unfortunately, Chuck doesn’t help much with housework, because he’s “too tired” after working all day (like I’m not!), plus he does have to carry the load of fixing stuff around the house as it breaks, mowing the lawn and taking the trash out. I do appreciate having a man around the house.

Amanda has chores, but sometimes it’s easier to just do everything myself because at least it gets done right and when I want it done. Plus, I get tired of hearing myself nagging her to help me. It always leads to the same argument: “Geez, Mom, why do you have to scream at me?” followed by my usual response, “Because you don’t listen to me until I do!”

God, I should stop bitching. I’m very happy. I love my husband, I love my daughter, and we have a nice, upper middle class life … not wealthy enough to live in Pepper Pike or Gates Mills, but that’s fine with me. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in that kind of ritzy environment ... my sensibilities are borderline blue collar, the way I grew up, and I have to deliberately remind myself not to swear like a trucker … being around the ultra-rich makes me so nervous that filthy, obscene things pop out of my mouth before I realize that words are coming out.

So I’m grateful that I have my pleasant little life … the life most people aspire to attain. We have the house, the cars, the occasionally snarling teenager with no drug habits or pregnancies, and we do have sex often enough. It’s just not the way it used to be before we became grownups and both developed trouble getting it up, so to speak.

Back to that night ... while Amanda was coercing me to watch the DVD, Chuck yelled from the kitchen, as he came in from the garage with dinner, “Amanda, come get your homework off the table or it’ll get all greasy from the pizza box, which I am about to put down, right on top of it!”

Homework? The child had said nothing about homework, on cabin-getaway weekend. Go figure. She hurried to the kitchen to snatch it before I could. Too bad for Amanda that her dad beat both of us to it. He started reading as we raced into the room, “Watch the movie Gandhi and answer the following questions. One, how would you feel if you were subjected to the unfair treatment …”

Amanda managed to grab it out of his hand before me, but not before I got the gist. She had homework, which definitely changed her plans for the weekend, at least as far as I was concerned.

Chuck started to say, “Your assignment is to watch a movie? What happened to reading a book?” but I waved him off. I gave Amanda the stink eye and grabbed the paper, giving it a quick glance. Due date: this coming Monday. Assignment date: two weeks ago!

Know this: I’m not a mean mom. I’m not one of those hard asses who would make a normally good kid miss a weekend of fun with her friends because of homework, especially since I don’t believe kids should be assigned homework over the weekend. I would usually try to find a way to help her do both. But the little brat lied to me and tried to trick me into doing her homework for her. Homework that had been assigned TWO WEEKS AGO!

So the next day, she and I sat our happy asses down on the couch to watch Gandhi. Together. She wasn’t getting out of this one and I was going to see to it, even if I had to sit through a three hour movie about the history of some old dead dude in India instead of having the house to myself and my erstwhile lover, watching an old VHS tape of Nine ½ Weeks, drinking wine and reminiscing about my rapidly fading youth.

Now that I’m typing this out and putting it all together (See? This idea of a diary is already paying off!), I can say that it was definitely the Gandhi weekend that things started getting weird, because I know for a fact that I had never seen Melinda before that day, and I would have remembered her wild, red hair. This is especially strange, because Chuck tells me she’s lived across the street from us for almost half a year. But I remember waking up from that strange dream (I’ll tell you about that in a minute) and noticing her chasing that terrified young woman out of her house.

I remember noticing the dichotomy between this movie I was watching, about someone who was practically a saint, and the seemingly crazy-violent redhead who I never knew lived right across the street from me.

I’m getting ahead of myself...

I fell asleep watching Gandhi. Sue me. It’s long, I was tired, and how often do I get to lie down on the couch, on purpose, for three hours?

I did make it about a half hour in, before I drifted, and I really did enjoy what I saw. What an amazing man he must have been! To stand up to the kind of oppression that Indians faced in South Africa, and take deliberate beatings just to prove a point ... wow! I wished I could be more like that … not to get beat up because of the color of my skin, but I wished I could make a difference in the world, instead of filing and typing correspondence for my illiterate creep of a boss.

My boss really is a creep, too. Bruce Wayne is his name, believe it or not. Yes, Bruce Wayne. Only he doesn’t look like Keaton, Clooney or Bale. He doesn’t even look like Adam West. What he looks like is a horse’s ass.

He’s one of those smarmy jerks who wears too much cologne, expensive golf shirts and Dockers to work (when the rest of the men in the office wear suits) because he’s the CEO and he can. He smugly looks down his nose at the women in the office, as if they were all members of his private harem, scraping and bowing, hoping to be the one chosen to pleasure him. Problem is, three of them play that game with him, making it harder for those of us who don’t … especially those of us (me) who have to report directly to him and who have to share office space with him.

My desk is right outside his door, in sort of an anteroom office, between his office door and his private executive restroom (la di da!) so I can see when these simpering pinheads go into his office, all flirty, and close the door. Fifteen minutes later, they come out with their hair all messed up and God only knows what kind of DNA stains on their persons. It’s simply revolting. Personally, I’d rather have sex with a pig. He better watch his step, too, because with only fifty four employees this pond isn’t big enough for word to not get out that there’s a fisherman on the pier with three hooks on his line. It baffles me how they don’t know about each other, because everyone else sure does.

So, yeah, working for Bruce gives me nowhere near any kind of feeling that I’m contributing to the betterment of mankind or fighting for equality like Gandhi. Watching the movie only made me feel worse about myself, so I guess I have yet another excuse to fall asleep only thirty minutes in to the movie.

Eventually, I think, I’m going to have to watch it again all the way through, because now that I think back, I’m not sure where the dream began (I bet you forgot I was even telling you about a dream I had) and where the movie left off. It all sort of ran together.

I last remember a scene where Gandhi was telling his wife that he gladly took his turn cleaning the latrine because they were all equal on the ashram. I recall thinking that Chuck would let the latrines in our house look like we live in a service station before he’d ever lift a toilet brush. Not when there are two females in the house who are “more suited” to be doing that kind of work. I remember sincerely wishing to God, as I drifted off, that there was more meaning to life than being so deeply grateful for a quick, precious nap on a Saturday afternoon.

What I remember first about the dream, itself, was the singing. Not singing, actually, more like a long, melodious “Aaaaaaaah.” I hate to describe it as an angelic chorus, because that’s not exactly what it was. It was an exquisite tone that I slowly became aware of, and it did make me think of angels singing, even though I never actually saw any angels. I don’t know how else to describe it. It literally gave me goose bumps.

It was so beautiful! I’d never heard anything like it before, but I also recognized it immediately. Does that make sense? I still haven’t puzzled that one out, but it is what it is ... this beautiful, familiar, singing tone.

And then I saw this sort of cloudlike thing, but it wasn’t really a cloud. (Could I be more vague?) It was more of a vaporous form that kept changing shapes and with the most incredible colors! You know how sometimes, when you blow bubbles, one of them catches the light and you get a mini laser show in its iridescence? It was kind of like that, really shimmery and colorful, and … happy.

Yes, it was a happy cloud, and yes, I know how crazy that sounds. I told you I was questioning my sanity, didn’t I?

It pulsed and danced along with the angel tone. It was the greatest dream I’d ever had and I do recall hoping that I wouldn’t wake up just yet. I wanted more of this. It was the closest thing to great sex that I’d experienced in a long time, but it wasn’t like dirty sex: it was like those fleeting moments that happen once in a blue moon, the kind of sex that feels like you’ve touched God.

I know that sounds wrong. God and sex do not go together. I know that. But, since it’s just me and my diary here, I have to admit that once in a while I do feel like I’m communicating with God during sex. And then I remember that sex is supposed to be sinful and all that, and He immediately leaves.

The cloud seemed like it was getting closer to me, reaching for me as I reached back. It wanted me as much as I wanted it. We touched … hands? Does a cloud have hands? This one seemed to, because it reached out and when it touched my hands I was instantly filled with a brilliance that took my breath away. I  gasped and sat up, bolt upright, on the couch and saw Amanda’s startled face asking, “Mom, are you okay?”

And that’s when I turned my head and saw, out the living room window, my across-the-street neighbor Melinda chasing that skinny hippie chick out her front door and down the street.

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