A Marvellous Light

by Freya Marske

Robin Blythe is a down-at-the-heels baronet, responsible for taking care of his sister and the sadly diminished estate his profligate parents left him. When he takes a civil service job, a clerical error lands him in a job he is in no way prepared for: the PM’s liaison to a society of magicians. Actual magic-using magicians, not the stage sort. Magicians who aren’t supposed to exist.

As if that weren’t bad enough, his predecessor has disappeared under extremely mysterious circumstances, and left the office in a complete mess. And his counterpart in the magical world’s bureaucracy, Edwin Courcey, is a snob who has very little use for him. An arrogant, prickly, and distinctly alluring snob.

Soon Robin and Edwin are deep in the mystery of the disappearance of Robin’s predecessor, which leads them to discover a ruthless plot to control all the magic in the British Isles. Hijinks ensue.

Fans of The Magicians and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell will be delighted with this high-stakes romp through a fantastical mirror-universe version of Edwardian England.

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

read by Bahni Turpin

Children of Blood and Bone takes place a richly-detailed mythical African country called Orïsha, in which magic is very real. That is, it’s real until a ruthless, despotic king decides that magic and the dominant social order can't coexist. So he finds a way to sever the people’s connection to the gods; after that, it’s effectively dead. He then proceeds to persecute and oppress the former magic-using caste, calling them “worms” but treating them worse than any animal.

Our protagonist, Zélie, has the distinctive white hair of a (potential) magic user, and still has flashbacks to the night her mother was hauled off and killed by the king’s soldiers. As a “worm,” Zélie lives in grinding poverty and constant fear of the random cruelty of the king’s brutal guards. Not only is she not safe, but nobody associated with her has any real expectation of safety or fair treatment. 

Very much against her own better judgment, Zélie finds herself helping a young woman escape from the king’s guard… and that young woman turns out to be a royal princess, and in possession of an item that just might let Zélie bring magic back. If she can learn how to use it, and whom to trust, and if she can stay ahead of the king’s guard and get to a mythical island on the one day of the year that it appears.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes what could be a fairly standard fantasy plot line and enriches it, transforms it, and fills it with surprises. Not simply by setting it in a mythical Africa instead of a mythical Europe, though Adeyemi does a wonderful job of that (Nnedi Okorafor calls it Africanjujuism); but also by taking individual elements of the plot (the romantic interest, the rules by which magic works, the hero’s journey) and subverting them.

In short, this is a very solid and compelling read, especially for anyone who loves fantasy or who used to love fantasy but has become bored with how derivative the genre has become. 

A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab

read by steven crossley

As a gamer myself, it seems abundantly clear to me that the author of this book is also a gamer. As I was reading, I could almost see the rules for the magic system taking form around me (here is the list of magical elements; here is a description of the relationship of the planes on which the different Londons exist; here is the fumble chart for magic items—oh no, wait, you’re dealing with an Artifact, see Index D7).

Also, clearly, here are two player characters with elaborate back stories who have no reason whatsoever to hang out together (clashing alignments, anyone? Plus they come from different planes) and the GM had to go to great lengths to cause the world to not only shove them together without them killing each other, but on top of that to give them a common goal. If you’ve ever been the GM in that kind of situation, you know how annoying it can be. Herding highly territorial cheetahs.

I don’t mean this as a bad thing; quite the reverse. It's something that amused me somewhere in the back of my head as I read.

So: in the book there are four Londons (that we know of), each on a different but intersecting plane of reality. Delilah Bard is a rogue (excuse me, a resourceful and dextrous young woman with a fine appreciation for the moral gray areas of life) who comes from Grey London, where there is no such thing as magic. Kell is a magic user (excuse me, a powerful, acerbic, and somewhat arrogant man with the ability to use runes and words and blood to bend reality and travel between the planes) from Red London, where magic is abundant and the people live in harmony with it.

The two of them come into contact because of a plot originating in White London, which is a cold, miserable place where magic is all about dominance and is gradually bleeding away, along with everybody’s life force. The plot involves an artifact from Black London, which we don’t talk about, because its fate is too horrible.

Kell ends up with the artifact, Delilah swipes it from him, both come to grief in different ways, and horrific hijinks ensue. 

This is a fine fantasy novel with very high-caliber world-building. Recommend.

Circe by Madeline Miller

Narrated by Perdita Weeks

When I was about 14 years old, I read Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis and it changed my life. It was the story of Cupid and Psyche, told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. I’d always loved Greek mythology, but under Lewis’ skillful hand, this story and the world it’s set in came vividly to life. Suddenly these were real people with real flaws dealing with, yes, problems on a more-than-human scale, but in a very human way. It was like that moment in The Giver when Jonas begins to learn to see in color. If the people in this story were really human, maybe the people in other myths were, too—maybe they were all human stories, about people not so different from me. All a question of perspective, and mine had shifted, permanently.

Then I reread it as an adult with adult critical faculties—and was deeply disappointed by it. The misogyny that runs through it is so deeply ingrained in the plot and the characters that there was no ignoring it, no compartmentalizing it or separating it from an otherwise beautifully-written book. The whole premise of the thing was that Psyche’s older sister was ugly, and the fact that her younger sister was beautiful and got all sorts of goodies for it—adventure, romance, the attention of the gods—twisted her insides up so badly that she became as ugly on the inside as on the outside. And this was just natural: of course any ugly woman would be so twisted with envy and hatred for any attractive woman that her life would be one big bitter pill. Even if it was her baby sister.

I may go back to it a third time. Maybe I’ve mellowed enough with age to appreciate its virtues as well as its faults. Maybe.

But I don’t have to. Madeline Miller has written Circe, and I so, so wish I could go back in time and hand it to 14-year-old me. It would have blown her mind in exactly the same way as Till We Have Faces, but without the nasty misogynistic-garbage aftertaste.

There’s not much to say about the plot of this book if you’re at all familiar with Greek mythology. Circe is the witch who turns Odysseus’ crew into swine (and well they deserved it); she’s the one who turned the nymph Scylla into the hideous sea-monster to whom we unwittingly refer when we say “between a rock and a hard place” (the original rock being the one Scylla lived in, and Charybdis, another sea monster or maybe a whirlpool nearby, being the hard place—it was apparently not an easy thing to navigate safely between the two); she’s the goddess of magic, or maybe her daughter; she’s a nymph; she’s a misfit; she’s a mother of heroes; she’s the daughter of the mighty titan, Helios.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes all of these disparate identities and scraps of legend and weaves them into one complex but utterly believable being. I mean, aren’t we all a little complicated, and, once we’ve lived enough of life, wouldn’t the people who knew us best at one point in our lives hardly recognize us based on descriptions of us from people we knew in other eras?

Circe is no angel, and this novel isn’t an attempt to reform her. Thank the gods. Nor, however, does it romanticize her dark deeds, and neither does it wallow in them. What it does is create a portrait of an immortal life drawn from many, many strands, setting that life in an ancient Greece where magic is very real and the gods are all too manifest, and this portrait is clear and believable enough to seem like a window we could almost walk right through.

We see the court of Helios with its bickering nymphs, pitch-black and frozen by day while its lord is away and brilliant but brittle when he is in residence, through the eyes of his most neglected daughter. We see her exile to Aeaea, beset by wild beasts and worse sailors, as something she loves and hates in turn, and which in the end facilitates her coming into her own power and protecting her son. We see a person and a life in all of their facets. And maybe, if we’re women of a certain age, we see a little of ourselves.

But you don’t have to be any particular age or gender to be thoroughly ravished by this book. Five out of five stars.