A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This is the unplanned and unexpected sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians, an urban fantasy which I quite enjoyed despite its flaws. I enjoyed this while I read it, but not as much; it felt like a slighter retread of the first book, with less emotion, less spectacular set-pieces, and a climax that only works because of a magical and legal loophole that was never mentioned before in either book until it suddenly appeared to solve the problem.

On the plus side, the story moves along briskly, there's a subplot I really liked featuring one of my favorite characters from the first book, Verenice Tenebrae (the other person who escaped the House of Shadows), and it's nice to spend more time with the world and the characters.

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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.

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An Unkindness of Magicians