An Unkindness of Magicians

If you are just reading the description of this story, on the surface it looks like a pretty common plotline about magic users and magic competition. An urban fantasy story set in the already magical New York City. But what you don't know, and you learn in the first few pages of this novel is that it is so much more than that. This is a nuanced story involving political machinations, abuse of power, and privilege. Those who have the power abuse those who are considered expendable.

The story opens with a seemingly innocent, but still amazing feat of magic. Sydney, the stories protagonist lifts cars with magic, “The cars around her, as one, lifted gracefully into the air. Sydney held them there, rust-stained taxis and sleek black sedans with tinted windows, courier vans and a tour bus blaring the opening number of the latest Broadway hit. Ten feet above the ground, floating through the intersection like some bizarre migration of birds. A smile stretched, bright and wild, across her face. If the people in the cars could have seen it, they might have called it exhilaration. They might have called it joy.” Was it joy or was it a necessity? We won't know till the very end of Sydney's journey.

This story has a multiple POV narrative. Often authors fail to write definitive voices when using this narrative style, but Kat Howard's characters are clear and definable from one another. Sydney goes through a bit of a badass transition into an incredible force of will and magic. She will change society and win The Turning or die in the process. We have Ian formerly of House Merlin, who plays a good counterpart to Sydney. Laurent, the man who is highers Sydney to represent him in The Turning is also a force of good in the story. It is refreshing and wonderful to have a story that is mostly trope free. Sydney is a badass. Just that. She doesn't need a man to save her nor make ridiculous mistakes that are out of her character for sake of literary convention. No. She is just a badass. I loved it, and you will too.

The narrative and plot arc is fast-paced. The story comes at you in the first chapter or so and doesn't stop. The narrative takes place over a short amount of time so this helps keep up the action.

I've read quite a lot of Urban Fantasy and it is one of my favorite genres. I can say this is one of the better books I have read representing the genre. I am certainly looking forward to a second book to continue Sydney's story. Good characters, great world-building, interesting magic system. You can't go wrong.

Hovering between 3 and 3.5. This was a solid world with an intriguing, if sometimes confusing, magic system, although it felt really rushed during some major scenes and I wound up not feeling attached to most of the main characters.

Every two decades or so, there is a Turning: a magical tournament in which the various magical Houses participate in for a chance to win and become the leading House of the Unseen World. This time though, the Turning happens in 13 years instead of 20, and a mysterious champion turns everything upside down when she emerges from the Shadows to represent an unknown, new candidate.

I usually don't like urban fantasy but I'll give this book props for writing urban fantasy in a way that still somehow managed to engage me a lot. I also really appreciate that the book casually weaves in modern technology into the magical world. The magicians live in a world pretty much like our own, just that they take care to hide themselves from us “mundanes”, something pretty akin to the world of Harry Potter. But they don't shy away from technology. In fact, they've found a way to wrap up some magic with technology itself, so emails can be sent with wards and spells, or similarly some wards over information can make a person unable to type anything but nonsense if they attempted to convey that information electronically.

The characters were OK, but honestly I didn't find most of them super interesting. Our protagonist, Sydney, is probably the most fleshed out person in this book, but for some reason she fell a little flat for me. She was okay. I didn't hate her, I didn't love her, and because she has a pretty traumatic past, she wasn't much given to expressing affection or humour. The only way she knew how to express herself was in asserting her magical powers, which was pretty badass but I felt like we barely scratched the surface of what she could do.

She has a bit of a romance with another character in the book, but the beginning of it felt a little abrupt. I get that it was a one-night stand, but then they just randomly ditched a Challenge that Sydney had just finished and hopped off within 5 sentences of meeting each other? I didn't really buy it. I didn't mind the romance. I didn't really buy into it, but it wasn't obnoxiously annoying and was really kinda barely-there for me to really have much thoughts about it either way.

The antagonists in this book all kinda felt a little too much like cartoon villains, and not even particularly powerful ones at that. The only one I was remotely interested in was Shara, and I felt like it'd have been nice to see more from her perspective, what her motivations were, what she may possibly have suffered before, what had caused her to be trapped to the House of Shadows etc. but then she died but none of these were answered, at least not in this instalment. I was also a little miffed that the major confrontations in this with the villains near the end was so short and abrupt. Both of them, even the big fight scene at the end, lasted a grand total of TWO pages each. That's really hardly enough and barely gives us a taste of what badassery magic is capable of. So the climax of the book was really anticlimactic - over before it even really began - and the bad people were just casually eliminated or chased away before we really felt like anyone was in danger. Heck, even Sydney's destruction of the House of Shadows took me by surprise at how short and abrupt it was. I even had to read back and check whether it wasn't just a dream sequence because it felt like it. So she waited all this time and suffered at the hands of Shara, when she could've just gone in and burnt everything down as soon as she acquired the magic from the Four Seasons duel? Why did she even wait? I don't think her magic even increased much between the Four Seasons duel and when she finally decided to tear the House down.

There generally seemed to be a lack of stakes in this book too. Although the tournament was all about killing people, and there were a few slightly gruesome deaths that happened, we barely see any of the major characters being killed off. I had expected Miranda to die during the duel between Sydney and Ian, but nope, she just got her magic somehow sheered off for some inexplicable reason. Between Sydney's little support group of Laurent, Harper, and Madison, I really expected one of them to die - but nope, none of them did, even though Madison came close. Sydney was never even close to dying so by the end I wasn't even sorry that she lost her magic because I felt like she had been in god mode for the entire story and we were finally seeing some sacrifices on her part.

Just want to give a shoutout to the only character that I actually got attached to: the actual House Prospero, who is a cinnamon roll.

DNF at 14%

Wow, I didn't even make it to my usual 30% DNF rate. I picked it up because 1) the cover is gorgeous and 2) Neil Gaiman recommended?? But honestly, I don't see why Gaiman raved about it. The pacing is all over the place, the magic system isn't explained all that well, heck the competition isn't even explained.

There are too many characters/POVs, and I really dislike the names in the book. I take offence that great literary magicians like Merlin and Prospero are associated to this book. Did the author run out of ideas in terms of naming her characters? Or was it deliberately done to attract high fantasy readers and rope them into this urban setting? Either way, I think it was a terrible choice, and I'm surprised no other reviewer has mentioned this.



Also, a lot of reviewers mention the writing/language as being spectacular and I really don't see it. The author reuses the same vocabulary over and over again to create an eerie/unsettling atmosphere, but it gets redundant very fast. Furthermore, the writing really isn't that fabulous. The amount of fragmentary sentences and run-ons is staggering, and while I can appreciate that it might be part of the author's style, it is not what I would qualify as “spectacular.”

Unfortunately, the pretty cover is the only good thing about this novel, but it's not enough to keep it on my shelf.

This is a spoiler-free review

It turns out, of course, that the unseen world has a very twisted dark side controlling it that everyone just chooses to ignore. Jerks.

Our main character Sydney, a previously unknown (and super bad ass) outsider, comes out of the shadows, literally, to reveal the forgotten corruption and set things right in the unseen world.

Also there's a serial killer who steals the bones of dead women to take their magic, and houses that transform themselves and speak to you.

Read this book and then read it one more time. The ending had me torn, but honestly with a title like this, you can't expect everyone to ride off into the sunset.