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The Message

Review by Deborah Mason

National Book Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 book Between the World and Me, and his 2017 essay collection, We Were Eight Years in Power, exposed the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on our understanding of America’s origins and its present. Written with clarity and forensic objectivity, his revolutionary insights into our society challenged us to not only acknowledge this past but also actively redress its lasting harms. His new book, The Message, is personal and introspective; four related but standalone essays chronicle Coates’ own revelations about the role stories play in shaping and misshaping our perceptions of the world.

Coates argues that writing is both an artistic and a political act: Authors must write with clarity and create narratives that explain and expose the world with urgency—and they must examine the stories we have been told as well as those we tell ourselves. How do authors extract truth from history, separate myth from fact? Coates travels to the Senegalese island of Gorée, which is prominent for its perceived significance in the slave trade. He acknowledges it as a “mythical site of departure”: According to scholars, very few enslaved people actually passed through its infamous Door of No Return. But on the island, Coates had a remarkable epiphany about the ways in which the myth-making about Gorée as “sacred, a symbolic representation of our last stop before the genocide” has obscured the lasting impact of colonialism on Africa. Still, that myth holds unique power: “We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places,” Coates concludes, “and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”

His journey to East Jerusalem and the West Bank brings questions about objective storytelling to the fore, in an essay both heartrending and hopeful. Coates courageously allows the reader to see the confusion, grief and anger he feels observing firsthand how Palestinians are relegated to second class citizenship in a segregated society, all while Israel is hailed as “the only democracy in the Middle East” by the West—a situation which he finds all too familiar. Coates reports learning that illegal settlements steal Palestinian land. He shares meals with both Palestinians and Israelis, including a former Israeli soldier who tells him that Israeli forces subject Palestinians to a “constant threat of violence,” with methods that include home invasions targeting known innocents. Coates reflects on how Palestinian writers are seldom allowed to contribute their voices, and an “elevation of complexity over justice” shapes the narrative about the region.

Searching and restless, The Message is filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. Coates believes that writing can change the world. Achieving this mission is arduous, vital and necessary. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrestles with the weighty responsibility of being a writer in The Message, a powerful collection of essays.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything

Review by Alice Cary

Nadia Ahmed’s The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything is not only a charming Halloween tale, but also an excellent year-round story about facing one’s fears. Young Finn is scared of many things, including tree branches, butterflies, the color orange and flying. On Halloween, he stays home in his attic—noisy humans also make him anxious—while his older brother and sister have a grand time careening through the air. However, when they fail to bring back Finn his favorite Halloween treat (chocolate bats), he swears that he will fly to get his own next year. 

Ahmed’s prose perfectly captures Finn’s trepidation in just a handful of words that will resonate with young readers: “When Finn is afraid, his stomach swoops, his hands sweat, and he can’t move.” Happily, Finn’s gradual self-regulated program of exposure therapy works! He starts out small, simply touching a leafless branch “for one whole minute.” 

Ahmed’s whimsical illustrations are mostly in black and white at the start, except for flashes of that dreaded orange. Despite this limited palette, the pages are wonderfully appealing, never scary or dull. Finn is a simply drawn ghost, but somehow his spirit—pardon the pun—and resolution shine through on every page. As he tackles his fears one by one, color gradually enters his world. The final spread is a glorious ode to Halloween orange, as well as other small splashes of the rainbow. Ghoulishly great, The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything will inspire readers sidelined by their own jitters. 

 

The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything is a ghoulishly great Halloween story as well as an inspirational guide for readers sidelined by their own jitters.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Great When

Review by Chris Pickens

In his expansive and ambitious new novel, The Great When, Alan Moore pens a love letter to art, literature and London that’s sure to capture readers’ imaginations.

After the end of World War II, little in London remains intact. Lowly bookshop worker Dennis Knuckleyard strives to survive amid the rubble while running errands for his boss, Coffin Ada. Dennis doesn’t have a lot to hope for besides making a few pence here and there, getting a fresh meal at some point, and trying not to get tangled up in anything that could get him killed. If only it were that easy. On a routine job to buy some new inventory, Dennis finds a book that shouldn’t exist. But Dennis doesn’t know that the book is a key of sorts that reveals a truth hidden in plain sight: There’s another London, a parallel city full of mystery and magic and wonder. The book belongs there, in the Great When, as it’s called, and Dennis must return it before it costs him his life.

A veteran writer who penned some of the most important comics and graphic novels ever created (Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta), Alan Moore is well-known for his ability to spin a good yarn. He illuminates every little detail of a London reeling from the end of the war, and his joy in doing so is palpable; this book is as much a celebration of our London as it is the creation of a new one. Characters are so vividly rendered that you can practically see them in full-color illustrations: Murderous mob bosses, beguiling dames, dashing lawyers and crackpot magicians all leap off the page with an extra dash of liveliness. 

Moore is an excellent wordsmith, but he can sometimes get ahead of himself, and the sheer volume of similes and metaphors can bog his writing down. But stay attuned, and you’ll get sucked in. Readers seeking big ideas and colorful splashes of language will love exploring The Great When—and look forward to future entries in the Long London series.

Readers seeking big ideas and colorful splashes of language will love exploring Alan Moore’s two parallel Londons in The Great When.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

The Forbidden Book

Review by Tami Orendain

Seventeen-year-old Sorel’s arranged marriage is meant to unify two powerful Jewish families in her community in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. But when 17-year-old Sorel hears a voice in her head urging her to run on the eve of her wedding, she doesn’t think twice. Determined to leave her old life behind, she jumps from her bedroom window and disguises herself as a young man, taking the name Isser Jacobs. However, as she tries to flee the city, she is recognized—not as Sorel, but as an actual boy named Isser Jacobs, who apparently has many enemies. To leave for good, she must figure out how to separate herself from his identity without getting caught by the many people hunting her down.

Steeped in Jewish folklore and culture, The Forbidden Book is a fantastic tale with resonant political themes. Based on mythology concerning the dybbuk, a disembodied spirit that inhabits the body of a living person, this novel flows between the supernatural and the concrete in order to ask powerful questions about identity and beliefs. From the very beginning, The Forbidden Book blurs the line between fantasy and reality: Is the voice in Sorel’s head real? If so, whose voice is it, and why is she the only one who can hear it? From there, the story becomes more and more surreal, taking readers on a wild ride through dreams and visions that seep into reality.

Author Sacha Lamb uses the magical aspects of the story to highlight and tackle serious cultural and political issues. Sorel doesn’t know much about the voice in her head, but it drives her to question her place, power and identity as the betrothed daughter of a wealthy merchant. The disappearance of the real Isser Jacobs is shrouded in mystery, but it seems connected to his passion for printing and distributing illegal political pamphlets about Jewish Emancipation. As Sorel and the other characters work out what’s real and what’s not, they also explore themes around community, government and freedom.

At the heart of this story is Sorel, who spends the majority of the book trying to establish herself as an individual. As she uncovers the lies and truths around her, she must question every facet of her identity, including her family, community, faith and gender. Sorel’s nuanced and complex coming-of-age shows how developing an identity takes time, thought and care. Through all its twists and turns, The Forbidden Book ultimately remains centered around hope and how it can be a powerful catalyst for change—both for an individual and a whole community.

Based on Jewish mythology concerning the dybbuk, a disembodied spirit that inhabits the body of a living person, The Forbidden Book is a fantastic coming-of-age tale with resonant political themes.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

The Forbidden Garden

Review by Roger Bishop

In March 1921, the world-famous botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was named director of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, which was located in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) and devoted to the study of plant life. He initiated an ambitious plan to develop the world’s first seed bank, which he promised would be “a treasury of all known crops and plants” that would produce super crops that could alleviate global famine.

Award-winning author Simon Parkin vividly relates the tragic yet inspiring story of Vavilov and his team’s dedication to the project in The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice. By 1934, Vavilov’s pioneering effort had opened over 400 research facilities around the Soviet Union. The seeds, “stored in packets and filed for safekeeping in the wooden drawers that lined the seed bank’s dozens of rooms,” were irreplaceable; in some cases, they had been harvested from crops now extinct due to human activity. Vavilov recruited and trained a staff that understood their worth and felt a “keen sense of responsibility.”

In August 1940, Vavilov vanished. And in June 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Leningrad’s industrial factories gave the city strategic importance, and as the birthplace of revolutionary Communism, it “symbolized all that Nazi ideology opposed.” Hitler decided to “starve it into submission.” Without support from Stalin’s government and unable to move the seeds, the Plant Institute staff and others in the city lived and died through 872 days of siege.

The remaining staff now faced a moral question. “Eat or abstain?” Parkin writes. “Is any sacrifice justifiable in the name of scientific progress, or to protect one’s research? What responsibility did the botanists hold to the survival of future generations? . . . There is no doubt that the quarter of a million seeds, nuts and vegetables in the building . . . could have prolonged the lives of the botanists and, beyond that, the public.” A new director encouraged them to eat the collection, but, committed to their mission, they refused. Using the diaries and letters of the botanists, as well as later-recorded oral histories, Parkin paints a suspense-filled record of this harrowing time in history.

The Forbidden Garden uncovers the tragic, inspiring story of Russian botanists who sacrificed everything to preserve a quarter million seeds during World War II.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The City in Glass

Review by Noah Fram

In The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin writes of entities that are the personification of cities, which emerge once a metropolis grows large enough to safeguard it against predatory forces. Nghi Vo’s most recent work, The City in Glass, inverts this, proposing a city that was created by a magical being—in this case, a demon. In Vo’s telling, demons have a magpie-like love for shiny, exciting things like stories and romance and betrayal. Deeply intertwined with humankind and the world around them, they can build, lose and grieve just like anyone else. So when angels descend to smite the demon Vitrine’s beloved city of Azril for some arcane transgression, she stands in their way, for what little good it does. And then she sets out to rebuild from the ashes left behind.

The City in Glass isn’t really about Azril; it’s much more about Vitrine herself, because her city is as much a part of her as anything. It is the physical manifestation of her sometimes capricious desires, constructed in defiance of the demon’s past and all its traumas. Azril grows and changes along with Vitrine, functioning as an extended metaphor in this character study of a novel. An entire city’s history may play out in the background, but only two figures are at the forefront: Vitrine herself, and the nameless angel she curses after he and his brethren destroy Azril, trapping him on Earth with her.

Already a Hugo Award-winner for the novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Vo is at the peak of her craft with The City in Glass, tackling the impact of war and the way even deep-seated ideological enmities can crumble in the face of individual relationships with flowing, often meditative prose. In a genre so often characterized by complicated magic systems and dystopian politics, Vo’s insistence on dwelling entirely on people making the best of things is both refreshingly straightforward and oddly hopeful. Sometimes, in a fantasy landscape suffused with thousand-page installments in epic, connected multiverses, a short and beautifully written tale of a bereaved demon and a cursed angel finding ways to coexist is all you need.

The City in Glass, a beautifully written tale of a bereaved demon and a cursed angel, finds Nghi Vo at the peak of her craft.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Empusium

Review by Alden Mudge

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, opens in September 1913, when Polish 24-year-old Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives in the village of Görbersdorf, Germany, to be treated for tuberculosis. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the novel draws inspiration both from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and from a real tuberculosis sanitarium, which, in an afterword, the author notes her effort to precisely recreate.

But this is Tokarczuk, for whom the factual and historical are just the beginning. She is known for how she mines her inspiration to achieve the mythical, and for her deft, dark satirical wit. As the subtitle, “A Health Resort Horror Story,” would lead readers to hope, the forests above the village whisper and echo with eerie sounds. The somber woods are seasonally populated by sooty charcoal burners, workers who in their off-hours fashion female effigies from moss and ferns and twigs. The narration, in the first-person plural, seems to come from ghostly entities who at times “vacate the house via the chimney or the chinks between the slate roof tiles—and then gaze from afar, from above.” There are no graveyards in Görbersdorf, where disease presides, but a cemetery in a nearby town discloses evidence of a ritual killing every November. It is September, and the clock is ticking.

While awaiting admission to the sanitarium, Mieczyslaw lodges at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen. The only other young person at the guesthouse is Thilo, an art student whose health is declining rapidly, and with whom Mieczyslaw develops an intimate friendship. The older men staying in the guesthouse come from various European cities, part of a society soon to collapse with the outbreak of World War I. After dinner, fueled by a ritual glass or two of the local psychoactive beverage, the men pontificate and mansplain, denigrating women in black-and-white terms that, Tokarczuk notes, are direct quotes from some of history’s brightest literary luminaries—Shakespeare, Yeats and many others. Mieczyslaw’s tablemates are full of certainty and unacknowledged fear.

Mieczyslaw listens, uncertain. The diagnosis that brought him to Görbersdorf came from his widowed father, who treated “the property entrusted to him in the figure of his son with great responsibility and—it was plain to see—love, albeit devoid of any sentimentality or any of the ‘female emotions’ that he so abhorred.” Mieczyslaw’s quest is to understand what, exactly, is wrong with him.

The Empusium is about a rigid patriarchal world and the tension between rationality and emotion. It is also about a young person coming of age—much like The Magic Mountain, which has been described as a bildungsroman. Facing a threat he does not understand, Mieczysl​​aw responds to the mysteries around him with curiosity and seeks his own way forward. Tokarczuk also favors a new path and, as usual, casts her enthralling spell.

Olga Tokarczuk’s deft, dark satirical wit is on full display in The Empusium, which challenges the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe with horror and humor.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

The Book of George

Review by Maya Fleischmann

By George, she’s got it! Annoying yet affable, Kate Greathead’s George is a captivatingly mediocre antihero.

There’s nothing very remarkable about George or his family. They have their issues. George’s mother, Ellen, has become increasingly disconnected from him over the years, though she remains intimidating to him. Ellen is separating from George’s father, Denis, because Denis’s enthusiasm for luxury fashion has been draining the family funds. Then there’s George’s older sister, Cressida, who is unabashedly straightforward and critical of George, and, like his mother, regards him with a hint of contempt. Despite this friction, the unassuming George manages his family dynamics with seeming nonchalance. In fact, he rarely makes a fuss about the events in his life, and only occasionally shows passion for a goal or project, such as a college major in philosophy, before quickly returning to his habitual listlessness. This passivity even applies to his on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend Jenny, who, like the members of his family, oscillates between having patience with him and finding him tedious.

The Book of George unravels George’s life in episodes that highlight his misadventures from ages 12 to 38. The epigraph, excerpted from a letter from the mother of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to her son, sets the narrative tone: Johanna Schopenhauer tells Arthur that while he has “everything that could make you a credit to human society . . . you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable.”

Greathead’s delicious deadpan delivery, with its understatement and ironic humor, is irresistible. The Book of George can take its place next to other novels with lovably frustrating main characters like Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove.

Kate Greathead’s delicious understatement and ironic humor makes The Book of George an irresistible portrait of a lovably frustrating mediocre man.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

The Cafe at the Edge of the Woods

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Rene is a chef with a dream: to open a café that serves her carefully crafted “fine cuisine.” And after hard work saving up “every bean” and constructing “a building beam by beam,” she’s thrilled to be opening The Café at the Edge of the Woods.

In his picture book debut, London-based Mikey Please—a BAFTA award winner and Oscar nominee for animated short films—fills every page with expertly and engagingly rendered cartoon art. His color palette glows with browns, greens and oranges, perfect for a woodsy café overflowing with funky flower arrangements. 

To Rene’s chagrin, this charming eatery doesn’t make a splash right away. Her “Waiter Wanted” sign resulted in just one applicant, a little green fellow named Glumfoot. And although it’s been days since the grand opening, no customers have arrived. 

Fortunately, Glumfoot’s a go-getter. He heads into the woods and returns with a gigantic ogre, who listens politely as Rene reads him her hand-chalked blackboard menu. When she suggests truffle stew with peas and long grain rice, the ogre requests “bats! And slugs and buttered mice!” Would he prefer a cheddar tart? No, he wants “a bag of bats! That smells like fart!”

Rene is frustrated, but Glumfoot urges his boss to hang in there: The ogre will try the tart after all. Little does Rene know that, after some artful rearranging by Glumfoot (a master of marketing and diplomacy if ever there was one), the tart gets “flipped onto its back, so it looked like a pickled bat” and “The rice became . . . maggot fondue! The whole lot looked disgusting.” 

Of course, to the ogre, disgusting is delightful! And to Rene, serving the food she adores (even if it looks ickier than she planned) is a dream come true. The Café at the Edge of the Woods is a wacky and wonderful ode to ingenuity and flexibility, topped with a hearty serving of teamwork and a dash of panache. Fans of Please’s funny, expressive illustrations and clever storytelling will be happy to know a second book in this new series will be served up soon. Chef’s kiss!

The Café at the Edge of the Woods is a wacky and wonderful ode to ingenuity and flexibility, topped with a hearty serving of teamwork and a dash of panache.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy RomanceFantasy

Swordcrossed

Review by Elizabeth Mazer

Sometimes, opening up a fantasy book is about leaving your world behind. But sometimes, it’s more about stepping into a brand-new one, so vividly detailed that you know the textures and tastes and the smells in the air. That’s the kind of world Freya Marske has created in Swordcrossed, set in the bustling city of Glassport. Detailed, intricate and meticulously planned, this fantasy romance will dazzle genre fans who crave an immersive experience and a rich love story to lead them through it.

When Marske’s tale begins, Mattinesh Jay doesn’t have time for a love story. What he needs is money, enough to keep his disastrously unlucky family from financial ruin. That money will come at Matti’s upcoming wedding to Sofia Cooper, via his bride-to-be’s bond price (i.e., her dowry). The wedding has to go without a hitch, and that means hiring the best swordsman Matti can afford to be his ‘best man,’ a role that includes defeating any challengers at the ceremony. Given the unfortunate fact that a talented duelist has strong feelings for Sofia, a challenge is all but inevitable. When Matti falls victim to a scam and his financial situation gets even worse, the best swordsman he can afford is . . . well, the scammer himself: Luca Piere, a man who is as silver-tongued as he is deft, as dangerous as he is tempting, and as infuriating as he is gorgeous.

This is a book for those who like their romance mixed with a hefty dose of world building—and more than a bit of intrigue, as it’s quickly revealed that the failing fortunes of the Jay family owe more to sabotage than to bad luck. Unraveling all the different factors and parties involved takes over a lot of the story. But the love light still manages to shine through as Matti and Luca fight each other, then fight against their feelings for each other, and then finally learn to give in to what they truly want. Their happy ending is one of the most satisfying I’ve read all year, showing that luck might be at the whim of the gods, but love is always a gift.

Freya Marske’s dazzling Swordcrossed is an immersive fantasy with a rich love story at its heart.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Barn

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The savage murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till at the hands of a group of white men outside the small town of Drew, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, stained the nation and galvanized the Civil Rights movement. In The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, noted sports journalist and Mississippi native Wright Thompson brilliantly recounts the story of that lynching, while deeply exploring the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta out of whose soil it emerged.

Wright made an estimated 100 visits to the barn where Till died, a site whose location has long been shrouded in mystery. To recount the terror of Till’s final night, when he was kidnapped, tortured and shot for supposedly whistling at a white woman (a report disputed by many), Wright relies on the vivid memories of Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who accompanied Till on the fateful trip south from Chicago and was fortunate the killers did not take his life as well.

Midway through The Barn, Thompson detours from Till’s story to excavate the vivid history of the Delta’s “gumbo mud,” which includes the birth of blues music in the person of Charley Patton on a plantation some 10 miles from the barn and the activities of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Wright painstakingly traces the rise and fall of a hardscrabble agricultural economy, which produced both men like Till’s uncle Moses Wright, a sharecropper whose home the teenager was visiting at the time of his murder, and J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the two people tried (and acquitted) for Till’s murder.

Thompson was raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi, near the farm Wright’s mother’s family first owned in 1913 and that it maintains to this day, and by parents who taught him to reject the bigotry that infected his home state. And so, he is acutely sensitive to his own ambivalence about what it means to be a Mississippian. “We spend so much time in the past here and yet so little time learning the history of who we are and how we got here,” he writes. The Barn is Thompson’s brave, forthright effort to begin the process of eradicating some of that ignorance.

Wright Thompson reckons with the culture of the Mississippi Delta and the murder of Emmett Till in his brilliant, probing history, The Barn.
FictionShort StoriesSatireLiterary Fiction

Rejection

Review by Thane Tierney

Rejection: Somewhere on the continuum between a casual date rebuff and a duo-destroying divorce, we’ve all experienced it. In Rejection, Whiting and O. Henry Award-winning author Tony Tulathimutte raises the experience to an art form. In seven connected stories, he chronicles several characters’ vivid responses to being turned down, or turned away. 

By vivid, I mean frequently TMI-delivering. Colorful descriptions of body parts and the multiple ways they can interact tumble off the page, and if depictions of sadism and ersatz semen (complete with a recipe) are off-putting, you might consider something more PG. On the other hand, if you can roll with the aforementioned, the book is frequently downright hilarious. 

In one story, the protagonist is a cartoonishly hyperactive tech bro, whose latest invention is living room furniture that also functions as workout equipment, allowing the user to crush out 300-pound leg presses. (Unfortunately, his team hasn’t yet worked out the “stinky/soggy upholstery” problem.) In another chapter, Tulathimutte documents a multi-hour consensus meeting in a university’s “queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op,” weaponizing and satirizing political correctness in extremis. 

As one might expect from a graduate of both Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulathimutte has a facility with verbal stunt-piloting that at times borders on the dazzling. Not every writer can pull off a sentence like this one, describing social media as “the give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give.” The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet. Pro tip; Boomers and Gen Xers might want to keep a browser tab open to Urban Dictionary for easy reference.  

Right at the end, Tulathimutte throws one last curveball reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, a little literary Ouroboros that may cause the reader to question the legitimacy of the entire narrative that precedes it. Clever trick, that, in a clever book aimed at clever readers. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s facility with verbal stunt-piloting borders on the dazzling in Rejection, a novel in seven stories that chronicles vivid responses to the experience of being turned down, or turned away.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy RomanceFantasy

Sorcery and Small Magics

Review by Dolly R. Sickles

Debut author Maiga Doocy weaves a charming, captivating tale with Sorcery and Small Magics, the first installment of her Wildersongs Trilogy.

Leovander Loveage is a successful sorcerer, but only when it comes to minor charms; he keeps the stakes low and colors inside the lines. His lesser spells may not ever win his father’s respect, but his lighthearted enchantments make people happy, and he’s accepted that powerful magic never works out for him. His nemesis, Sebastian Grimm, is his opposite. Grimm’s approach to magic is confident, strong—and gets on Leo’s nerves.

Leo and Grimm are students at the Fount, where Leo is a scriver, or writer of spells, and Grimm is a caster. They get into trouble when Grimm accidentally casts an illegal spell that binds Leo to obey his commands. It’s a power imbalance that is refreshingly never abused: Rather, it compels these two young sorcerers to work together to find a counterspell before anyone finds out what happened. They’ll have to employ the help of a powerful sorcerer who supposedly lives deep in the Unquiet Wood, a forest full of monsters and other dark things. As they embark on a quest together, it becomes clear that this grumpy-sunshine pairing just needed the right opportunity to find their way to happiness.

Doocy makes the academic pursuit of magic seem so normal and tactile that the reader feels they might open their own desk drawer and find quills and paper and ink. Matching the light tone of Leo’s witty narration, the stakes of using forbidden magic aren’t high beyond the personal fallout for him and Grimm: The world won’t end, the walls around the Fount won’t crumble, nobody’s going to die—but they will get cast out of school. Leo and Grimm are realistically flawed, lovingly hopeful characters, both of whom discover that they have more inner strength than they ever suspected. The two men have “never been anything but too much for each other,” but by the end of Sorcery and Small Magics, “too much” is just enough.

A sorcerer’s rival accidentally casts an obedience spell on him in Maiga Doocy’s witty and refreshing Sorcery and Small Magics.

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