Fucking Tabitha. She still did that thing to her eyes, the thing that made them look bigger and more open, more alive. Not makeup, something else. Something fucking magic. I didn't like looking at myself, seeing my eyes, and knowing that she had them, the exact same ones, and had decided that they needed to be better. [p. 72]
Tabitha Gamble is a Professor of Theoretical Magic at Osthorne Academy for Young Mages. Her twin sister Ivy is a Private Investigator, who believes that her own lack of magic explains all her failings and failures. When a woman is found dead in the library at Osthorne, Ivy is recruited by the headmaster to investigate the case. She has not, until now, seen or spoken to her sister for many years, since their mother's death from cancer.
Ivy finds herself in a world she's always avoided -- and is struck by how mundane it all is. There's slut-shaming graffiti in the corridors, and the linoleum is scuffed. There's a young man, Dylan, who's convinced he's the Chosen One who will change the world. (It can't possibly be his half-sister Alexandria: 'all she cares about is eyeliner and who's friends with who and popularity' [p. 69], though Ivy is not alone in finding Alexandria unsettling, and she's certainly the queen of her clique.) There's a charming teacher, Rahul, head of the Physical Magic department, who flirts with Ivy until even she can't deny he's attracted to her. And of course there's her estranged sister, who knew the dead woman, and who Ivy still can't help wanting to be friends with.
And, to quote Doctor House, everyone lies. Ivy lies to herself as well as to others; Alexandria weaves masterful webs of deceit; Tabitha is economical with the truth ... Even the murder victim, Sylvia, may not be what she seems.
It felt to me as though this novel was more about the characters than the plot: I don't think that's a bad thing, but anyone reading for the murder mystery aspect may find it disappointing. I was not disappointed. The focus is very much on Ivy and the (mostly female) individuals with whom she interacts. There isn't a huge amount of worldbuilding (the standard 'nobody non-magical knows about the magical world' applies) and Ivy's first-person narrative means that much of the backstory is about the relationship between Tabitha and herself. There's not even a great deal of magic.
Sarah Gailey's writing is evocative and emotionally complex, and they give us an unreliable and not always likeable narrator (Ivy did remind me, at times, of Evelyn in The Echo Wife, though she has too little power rather than too much) and makes us care about her. And we care, too, about the young women at the school, and the subplot of medical magic (particularly as it applies to women); and we care about dead Sylvia, whose room Ivy stays in while she's investigating.
A downbeat but utterly credible ending: a book I'll want to return to, I think.
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