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[alfreda89]

The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen M. Beckett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is recommended for folk who like their fantasy subtle, thick, and intricate.

Think Charlotte Bronte with magic, only this is a novel in that spirit, not a pastiche. Beckett wondered what would happen if a fantastical cause lay under the social constraints and limited choices of Bronte and Austen’s heroines? This world is the result, a British/European-flavored stew with a varying planet rotation that causes long days and nights peppered with short ones – sleep cycles clearly not in tune with the people forced to live that way.

What if magic was somehow behind that? We see familiar tropes – the family member whose senses are disordered, the woman forced to go far from home and family to be governess to neglected children, families forced from their homes because the death of a parent triggers inheritance away from daughters, arranged marriages gone awry – and all of it makes sense.

Magic is mostly forgotten, a dangerous state of affairs when a deadly enemy returns from the stars to plague a fragile Victorian-like world. It’s a world where different forms of magic are sex-linked, old institutions are rotten, class restrictions may ruin lives and hopes, and the very land itself may rise to defend against ancient threats – even as the citizens remember nothing of their old enemy or defenders, and destroy that which can save them.

We follow three protagonists, two male, one female, through the discovery of sometimes difficult and threatening history, both familial and cultural, and their rediscovery of very different types of magic. All while their own lives are upended by family and cultural demands. To top it all off, a revolution threatens.

This book is fascinating and has lovely ideas and writing, but it’s slow in parts. Have patience. Where the author seems to be beating a topic to death, in fact more information is being laid down – information that won’t come to fruition until the second book, or perhaps a third.

If you like your trip through epic fantasy lyrical, give this one a try.


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