Reviews with content warning for Abortion - Magic for Liars

Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed.

This is yet another book that feels like it's written for me personally: magic exists in the real world, but only a select few are able to wield it. Everyone else... lives a normal life. But even in a magic world, murder can still happen.

The setting & characters for this are exquisite: a school for magic just 15 minutes out of town. Teenagers who are little shits with a god complex because they can do magic and the middle-aged detective sent to solve the case can't. Estranged twin sisters who want to reconnect but have years of space in between them.

The audiobook for this was so thrilling because the narrator spoke with incredible nuance: stammering and slurring when the character was drunk, her voice going high & low while she internal-monologued about the case. I definitely want to read the physical book but mostly because the audiobook was so fascinating.

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joannemae's review

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dark mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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persephonefoxx's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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sephypear's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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incrediblemelk's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

This was the first dark academia book I’ve read where the protagonist is not a student, isn’t part of the academic community and has no special talents that would help them join it, so the book felt strange to me, and I found myself craving a sense of competence from the protagonist Ivy that she didn’t possess.

But that was the tone: Ivy’s inferiority complex and fear of being unmasked as an unqualified interloper. For this reason the book never really explains how the magic works because the narrator herself doesn’t know.

Ivy’s main strength was interviewing people, and the book was at its most nuanced in scenes where Ivy was deliberately seeking to set a tone and control a conversation.

I have to admit I was surprised that the book never took the easy way out of “what if it turns out that Ivy actually does have latent magical powers that were never trained?” But that would have been corny so I am pleased it never went there.

It had a strange, bitter vibe of an older person looking back at their life and their teenage self and wishing for a do-over that would never come, but also having the distance to recognise that the teen characters are kind of lost and that what a younger person would see as charisma is mainly bullying and bravado.

The plot twists were pretty easy to anticipate. The character of Dylan felt like a YA fantasy cliché and it was clear he was being established as a Chosen One stereotype because he absolutely was not a Chosen One.

This was an easy read and was not an outstanding, memorable story, but was not bad either. The stakes felt small and I would not be in a hurry to revisit this world and characters in a different book.

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