A review by betweentheshelves
Remedial Magic by Melissa Marr

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.
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