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ezwolf's review
Magic, libraries, and LGBTQIA+ characters sound like something I’d love. But I will not be finishing this. In fact, I made it about 10% through before deciding to stop. Usually I try and give a book a chance until 20% in but I have two reasons for stopping when I did.
1. Cancer. Due to personal reasons I’m just not in a place to handle cancer story lines in any capacity.
2. A Harry Potter reference. I am willing to overlook books written years ago for including Harry Potter references, but not a book set to be published in 2024, especially with the knowledge of JK Rowling’s terfiness. And especially not in a book that's advertised as queer.
Thank you to NetGalley for making this available in exchange for an honest review!
1. Cancer. Due to personal reasons I’m just not in a place to handle cancer story lines in any capacity.
2. A Harry Potter reference. I am willing to overlook books written years ago for including Harry Potter references, but not a book set to be published in 2024, especially with the knowledge of JK Rowling’s terfiness. And especially not in a book that's advertised as queer.
Thank you to NetGalley for making this available in exchange for an honest review!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail and Car accident
Moderate: Cancer
Minor: Death of parent
betweentheshelves's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Ellie is a librarian who is currently happy with her lot in life. Working at a small library in Ligonier, baking scones, and investigating the mysterious disappearances that seem to happen around her town. At least, she was happy with her life until a strange encounter with a woman named Prospero.
Prospero is a strong witch, and Ellie is the key to breaking the curse threatening the small witch village she lives in. After awakening Ellie’s powers, Prsopero brings Ellie to a magical college for witches. But what they both don’t know is that other powers are at work, that might not want to use Ellie for good.
Thanks to NetGalley and Bramble for an advanced copy of Remedial Magic by Melissa Marr to review! Melissa Marr is known for her YA novels featuring the fae, but this is the first adult novel I’ve read by her. It’s about a librarian, so of course I had to pick it up!
Marr mentions that she wrote this book specifically for her wife, and I love that. I appreciated the queernormative world she created in this magical community. The idea of a small magical community hidden from everyone else is also super fun, and I’d read more books with that particular plot device.
However, I think this book suffers from the fact that there are just too many narrators. From the original description, I didn’t realize we were going to get so many different points of view. It means that none of the characters are particularly developed; in general, most of their problems felt surface level. This also makes the overall world building suffer because the main threat was unclear to me.
Also the way they used magic was…interesting. It seems like some people have different gifts than others, and different levels of magic, which is fine. However, none of it is really spelled out, and there were some good opportunities for that since they are at basically a magical community college.
That brings us to the ending, in which Marr made some very odd choices (at least, in my opinion). There’s a cliffhanger, so I’m assuming there will be another book where things can be fixed, but in general, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Car accident and Ableism
Moderate: Cancer
Minor: Homophobia and Death of parent
beforeviolets's review
I was lent an ARC of this book by a bookseller friend, I was not sent this by the publisher. Though, per usual, this is my honest review.
DNF p. 66
I'm literally begging authors to unpack their implicit biases of white supremacy and ableism before they write cozy fantasy books.
This is a problem that has continued to grow in cozy fantasy and romantasy as genres, in which authors strive to create idyllic and comforting stories for their readers to “escape into.” And what is more comfortable than the familiar, than the unconfrontational? So they seek to create safe spaces without considering what is necessary for a safe space actually safe for the people who need it most (aka marginalized people). And instead they use these “escapist” narratives and “safe spaces” as a bubble to protect themselves from the discomfort of confronting their own biases. And so these stories tend to tread harmful ground by blindly and unknowingly perpetrating bigoted narratives.
TOR actually published a really wonderful article (ironically) about this problem. Though this article very specifically talks about racism in witchy romantasies, the sentiment can be applied to other pillars of white supremacy as well as other types of cozy fantasy and romantasy:
"SFF and romance both promise escape, but they falter when they forget that we cannot escape to without also escaping from. When we step back from the sparkling overlay of a book’s premise, we discover that we have ended up on the same old used paths, hiding the selfsame horrors from which we were promised escape beneath the veneers of fairy tale, utopia, or comfort. Whatever fictional or nonfictional marginalizations a white character may possess, they exist within the protective sphere of whiteness, and it is the moral imperative of white authors to grapple with that fact when we write about power, about history, about oppression—or else not to write about those things at all."
I highly recommend reading the whole article, and using it as a jumping-off point to do some learning and unlearning about what fantasy stories (especially cozy ones) have to say about power and marginalization: https://www.tor.com/2023/08/08/the-pr...
In this book's case, these issues bled into the story very obviously and very early on.
Upon meeting our third POV character, within a matter of pages, we are slapped in the face with a Harry Potter reference as the character finds out he's magical: “Yer a wizard, Dan.” In 2023. In a LGBTQ+ book. Truly, I do not understand in this day and age how these references continue to seep through stories, even after other books have made active changes to take out HP references from previous printings. If at this point you are not aware of JKR’s violent TERFism or the way Harry Potter has become a platform of bigotry (though of course, the books have always been riddled with transphobia, antisemitism, racism, a butchered Holocaust metaphor, and more since their inception. But as of recent, more and more right-wing individuals have been brought into the development of the franchise’s content, creating a huge escalation in the level of this bigotry. I highly recommend looking into the VERY clear antisemitism and racism of Hogwarts Legacy), or are not actively changing the way you engage with HP media because of it, then I don’t know what you’re doing.
And then, we learn that this character has been cured of cancer immediately upon entering the magical realm. A magical healing trope will always make me suck my teeth and roll my eyes, but after just a couple pages, the rhetoric escalated and became a little too clear: “Magic self-repairs the host. Witches, are, in essence, hosts to magic.” And we are told that if this character returns to the human world, his cancer will return. So… there’s no such thing as disabled witches, or disability in the magical world in general. Which of course, is incredibly alienating to any disabled reader, but also sheds light on precisely what this author would define as “idyllic” and “cozy”: a world free of disability.
As always, I don't feel good writing this review. I am not pleased or smug or joyful to report these findings. It's never fun to come across these sort of things in stories. But sadly, with the way cozy fantasy and romantasy (especially witchy ones) have been following a trend of pushing under-the-radar accidental bigotry and shrugging any criticism or deeper thought off with an "it's not that deep, it's just a silly fantasy story", I was not surprised to find content like this.
I will most definitely be emailing the publisher with my feedback, in hopes that this content will be changed in the final copies. Fingers crossed it is.
CW (so far): ableism (complacent in text), car accident, cancer, hospitalization, magical healing trope, death of parents (past), homophobia (mention)
DNF p. 66
I'm literally begging authors to unpack their implicit biases of white supremacy and ableism before they write cozy fantasy books.
This is a problem that has continued to grow in cozy fantasy and romantasy as genres, in which authors strive to create idyllic and comforting stories for their readers to “escape into.” And what is more comfortable than the familiar, than the unconfrontational? So they seek to create safe spaces without considering what is necessary for a safe space actually safe for the people who need it most (aka marginalized people). And instead they use these “escapist” narratives and “safe spaces” as a bubble to protect themselves from the discomfort of confronting their own biases. And so these stories tend to tread harmful ground by blindly and unknowingly perpetrating bigoted narratives.
TOR actually published a really wonderful article (ironically) about this problem. Though this article very specifically talks about racism in witchy romantasies, the sentiment can be applied to other pillars of white supremacy as well as other types of cozy fantasy and romantasy:
"SFF and romance both promise escape, but they falter when they forget that we cannot escape to without also escaping from. When we step back from the sparkling overlay of a book’s premise, we discover that we have ended up on the same old used paths, hiding the selfsame horrors from which we were promised escape beneath the veneers of fairy tale, utopia, or comfort. Whatever fictional or nonfictional marginalizations a white character may possess, they exist within the protective sphere of whiteness, and it is the moral imperative of white authors to grapple with that fact when we write about power, about history, about oppression—or else not to write about those things at all."
I highly recommend reading the whole article, and using it as a jumping-off point to do some learning and unlearning about what fantasy stories (especially cozy ones) have to say about power and marginalization: https://www.tor.com/2023/08/08/the-pr...
In this book's case, these issues bled into the story very obviously and very early on.
Upon meeting our third POV character, within a matter of pages, we are slapped in the face with a Harry Potter reference as the character finds out he's magical: “Yer a wizard, Dan.” In 2023. In a LGBTQ+ book. Truly, I do not understand in this day and age how these references continue to seep through stories, even after other books have made active changes to take out HP references from previous printings. If at this point you are not aware of JKR’s violent TERFism or the way Harry Potter has become a platform of bigotry (though of course, the books have always been riddled with transphobia, antisemitism, racism, a butchered Holocaust metaphor, and more since their inception. But as of recent, more and more right-wing individuals have been brought into the development of the franchise’s content, creating a huge escalation in the level of this bigotry. I highly recommend looking into the VERY clear antisemitism and racism of Hogwarts Legacy), or are not actively changing the way you engage with HP media because of it, then I don’t know what you’re doing.
And then, we learn that this character has been cured of cancer immediately upon entering the magical realm. A magical healing trope will always make me suck my teeth and roll my eyes, but after just a couple pages, the rhetoric escalated and became a little too clear: “Magic self-repairs the host. Witches, are, in essence, hosts to magic.” And we are told that if this character returns to the human world, his cancer will return. So… there’s no such thing as disabled witches, or disability in the magical world in general. Which of course, is incredibly alienating to any disabled reader, but also sheds light on precisely what this author would define as “idyllic” and “cozy”: a world free of disability.
As always, I don't feel good writing this review. I am not pleased or smug or joyful to report these findings. It's never fun to come across these sort of things in stories. But sadly, with the way cozy fantasy and romantasy (especially witchy ones) have been following a trend of pushing under-the-radar accidental bigotry and shrugging any criticism or deeper thought off with an "it's not that deep, it's just a silly fantasy story", I was not surprised to find content like this.
I will most definitely be emailing the publisher with my feedback, in hopes that this content will be changed in the final copies. Fingers crossed it is.
CW (so far): ableism (complacent in text), car accident, cancer, hospitalization, magical healing trope, death of parents (past), homophobia (mention)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism and Car accident
Moderate: Cancer
Minor: Death of parent and Homophobia
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