A review by rikerandom
The Magic Between by Stephanie Hoyt

3.0

Originally published on RikeRandom - find the full review and others there.

Content notes for Stephanie Hoyt's The Magic Between: bierasure, queermisia

Detailed content notes:

Spoiler

AB is continuously faced with biearasure by his fans and the media

A large part of this story is about coming out as an athlete and the queermisia permeating that field

Representation: both main characters are bisexual men, a bunch of side characters is also queer (including lesbian, pan and trans rep), one of the mcs deals with OCD and anxiety

Who names their main character AB? AB Cerise?! Every time I saw that name on page, my brain started singing the alphabet and, holy hell, was that annoying. Add to that the fact that Stephanie Hoyt's style of writing in The Magic Between is … something of an acquired taste and you can probably guess why I had a really hard time warming up to the story. Seriously, I am still not able to pinpoint what exactly it was about the writing that was so off-putting to me but I think it had to do a lot with AB's name and the feeling that the type of narrator used in the story seemed to fluctuate - while Matthew's POV felt like it had a very stable third-person narrator, the one in AB's chapters seemed to randomly switch between just relaying his POV and commenting on it in an off-hand way. I don't know, but it was weird and something that bugged me until the very end of the book … But more about said book!

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All in all, I thought that The Magic Between had a lot of potential - both in the magic world Stephanie Hoyt created and in the amazing supporting characters she wrote - but most of it was just a backdrop to a love story that, while managing to be both sweet and dealing with serious topics, just felt flat at points. In addition to a style of writing that, for me, was sometimes hard to read without being annoyed by it, there were a lot of minor things that seemed underdeveloped and they added up to make the whole story somewhat unsatisfying. This wasn't a bad book, but I felt like it could really have used a bit more polishing and maybe a clearer focus here and there.