Hidden Talent: A Story of Max, Make-up, Minute Tech, and Magic Gone Wrong (The Chronicles of Analetta) - Softcover

Book 1 of 3: The Chronicles of Analetta

Wuttke, David

9798192038598: Hidden Talent: A Story of Max, Make-up, Minute Tech, and Magic Gone Wrong (The Chronicles of Analetta)

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798192038598

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

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HIDDEN TALENT A Novel

"A wildly entertaining ride through love, magic, and the chaos of a life turned upside down — warm, funny, and impossible to put down."

My name was Max Calloway, and I was perfectly unremarkable.

Max has a good life. Not glamorous — but solid, real, his. By day he fetches coffee and sources wind machines for a multimedia company run by people who wouldn't recognize his name on a good day. By night he plays drums in an indie band that's building something in the Harrow Falls music scene, one Thursday gig at a time. And at home, there's Bethany — social worker, moral compass, the most quietly brave person he's ever known — who has loved him since freshman year and is, for reasons he doesn't entirely deserve, still there.

He has no talent for makeup. No training. No interest. Until the pendant.

One ordinary afternoon at a Renaissance fair, Max buys a piece of onyx jewelry from a young woman, whose self imposed spell, gives her the air of decades of wisdom, for twelve dollars, from a tent that smells of dried herbs and old magic. By the following week, he can do things with a makeup brush that professional artists spend careers trying to achieve. By the week after that, the women he works on are sending flowers to his office, showing up outside his building, and looking at him with an intensity that has nothing to do with gratitude and everything to do with a spell that was never supposed to work quite this way.

The pendant was made by Analetta — nineteen years old, self-taught, gifted beyond her training, and now traveling a Renaissance fair circuit four states away hoping Max never finds her. It was supposed to unlock latent talent. The love-return effect was a calibration error. She knows it. She's been working on the fix.

Max doesn't know any of this yet. What he knows is that his girlfriend is watching the women in his life with an expression he's never seen on her face before. That his coworkers have reorganized his schedule for his own safety. That a prom full of teenage girls nearly required an emergency evacuation through a loading dock. That the pendant won't come off. And that somewhere out there, a girl with old eyes and a leather case full of corrections is the only person who can help him.

Meanwhile, Bethany is carrying her own secrets — a family she's been funding from her personal savings, a budget audit at work that could end her career, and a best friend whose career-defining photo shoot left her glowing in ways that had nothing to do with the lighting. And Analetta, moving from fair to fair with the group that has always been her world, is beginning to understand that the curse her mother warned her about — the one that has been aging the women of their family ahead of their time, the one cast by a rival family long gone — may be running faster than either of them realized.

Hidden Talent is a gloriously entertaining debut novel about talent discovered too late, magic deployed too soon, and the specific chaos of a life that was perfectly ordinary until it suddenly, completely wasn't. Warm and funny and surprisingly moving, it is a story about what we're born carrying, what we give to the people we love, and what happens when the returning is considerably louder than the original.

Praise for Hidden Talent:

"Charming, chaotic, and completely irresistible — a love story disguised as a magic story disguised as a very bad week."

"Max Calloway is the kind of accidental hero you root for from the first page. Bethany is the kind of woman who makes you want to be better. And Analetta is the kind of character who stays with you long after the spell is broken."

"The funniest book I've read about cursed jewelry. Also the only book I've read about cursed jewelry. Both of those things are compliments."