rachelmanija | An Unkindness of Magicians, by Kat Howard

Urban fantasy, but old-school (magicians in New York) not "hot woman slays things." The snobby secret society of New York magicians is organized into Houses, and ruled by one of them; which one is chosen every 20 or so years in a ritual called the Turning, a series of magical duels. The system has worked for hundreds of years, but this Turning is different…

I feel that it is not spoilery to say that the magician society is not only awful on the face of it, but their power is based on a dark not-really-secret which is revealed quite early on to the reader. Early on, it seems like one of those books where everyone is horrible and that's just the way it is, but it turns out to not be that at all—the society is awful, but the story is about the people trying to fix or overthrow it. A lot of the characters are surprisingly nice; the heroine, an escaped slave who wants to free the other slaves and end slavery, is pleasingly ruthless in pursuit of her genuinely altruistic goal.

There are tons of great female friendships and a couple of nice male-female ones too. There’s lots of trauma recovery, and a really good take on PTSD that's not at all the cliched one. (I was very amused to realize that one plotline more-or-less fulfills a prompt I saw in Hurt-Comfort Exchange, “Haunted House/New Tenant (both hurt).”) The magical duels are inventive and beautifully described.It was all way more up my alley than I thought it would be based on the first few chapters. It’s also extremely page-turny, which is why I kept reading past the first few chapters, and I’m glad I did. It’s the first in a series, but has a reasonable ending.

There’s not a big focus on graphic violence, but there are some gory moments and torture (the latter mostly referred to rather than happening on-page), a serial killer, and child harm (again, mostly just referred to rather than shown.)

There's some plot/information-revealing issues—some things are kept from the reader that would have been better revealed early, others are revealed early when they would have been better as surprises, and I was often a bit puzzled over issues regarding who knew what. I also didn’t quite buy the main sexual relationship as a romance (oddly, I did buy it as a friendship, which is not how that usually goes). But overall it was very good and I really look forward to the next book.

Spoilers!

We know right away that Grey is the serial killer, and it's very easy to extrapolate why he's doing it, why he was kicked out of his House, etc. I think that entire plotline would have been stronger if we didn't get his POV and found out when the characters did. In particular, Laurence's reaction lost a lot of impact because we already didn't care about his relationship with Grey as we knew almost from the get-go that Grey sucked!

In terms of my confusion over who knew what when, I was consistently confused over who knew that their magic was enabled by child sacrifice. I'm still not sure whether the author intended readers to assume that Laurence knew all along and to be surprised when he didn't, or if that was an accident.

I can believe that Sydney would start a relationship with someone she knows perfectly well she'll eventually have to duel to the death with because she's all kinds of emotionally messed up, but I was bewildered by why Ian did. I completely believed that they liked each other a lot, but I didn't get the sort of consuming sexual intensity where you do things you know are crazy that would have made it make sense from Ian's POV.

An Unkindness of Magicians

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Early on, it seems like one of those books where everyone is horrible and that's just the way it is, but it turns out to not be that at all—the society is awful, but the story is about the people trying to fix or overthrow it.

That is definitely much more interesting for me.

I also didn’t quite buy the main sexual relationship as a romance (oddly, I did buy it as a friendship, which is not how that usually goes).

Do they move from a friendship to a romance and should just have stayed friends? Or do you just mean that the connection between them is believable, just not the sexy parts?

No, it starts out as a romance. Basically I believed the emotional connection, but it seemed more of a friendship than a romance. Any relationship between them was so incredibly a bad idea - they're duelists who are on a path to fight each other to the death - that for them to jump into bed and then continue their romance, I wanted a super-intense sexual connection that would override common sense to make that believable, rather than just that they seemed to like each other as people.

Edited 2019-03-18 18:35 (UTC)

Any relationship between them was so incredibly a bad idea - they're duelists who are on a path to fight each other to the death - that for them to jump into bed and then continue their romance, I wanted a super-intense sexual connection that would override common sense to make that believable, rather than just that they seemed to like each other as people.

I agree that in the absence of convincingly overwhelming sexual chemistry, that seems less ultimately tragic than stupid to begin with.