The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones
by Lex Croucher
Reading THE UNMAGICAL LIFE OF BRIAR JONES (Harper Voyager, 447 pp., $32) — the adult debut by Croucher, who has written several charming young adult novels — I completely lost my grip on time. I was so engrossed in the book, so immersed in the author’s imagination, I forgot to eat dinner. When I finally emerged, I was exhausted, starving, a bit teary-eyed and totally exhilarated.
The novel follows Briar and Sebastian, inseparable childhood best friends who dreamed of attending the Temple School of Thaumaturgy — an upper-crust English institution whose curriculum is rumored to include sorcery — together. When the friends were 11, Seb was admitted to Temple, but Briar (who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns) was not, leaving Briar utterly crushed.
When the book picks up, it’s seven years later, and Briar and Seb haven’t spoken since. Then Briar takes a temp job at Temple. When they arrive, their hopes of magic’s existence are realized — but they also discover that sensitive Seb has transformed into the most powerful member of a gang of evil upperclassmen. Briar quickly finds their own group: the posh nerd Westby, dandy Tate and firecracker Hadley, who form a queer-friendly bubble within the traditionalist school. Something, Briar learns, is very rotten at the heart of Temple, and the foursome is determined to dismantle it.
Croucher is a deliciously witty writer, with a knack for seamless pop culture references, and is especially effective at writing about the camaraderie that blooms when you and your companions are running for your lives. Briar’s story — part action adventure, part tender second-chance romance — is a moving meditation on friendship and trust, class and power, the terrible choices that do not have to define us. It’s my favorite fantasy novel I’ve read all year. I would happily skip more meals to hang out with this gang again.
We Hexed the Moon
by Mollyhall Seeley
Seeley takes a spikier approach to friendship in her debut novel, WE HEXED THE MOON (Saga Press, 215 pp., paperback, $18). Jen, Goldie, Maycie and Harding are four best friends caught, in the summer of 2014, in that liminal space between senior year of high school and the rest of their lives. Like so many bored teenage girls before them, they decide to fill one of their waning days together with a ritual — complete with candles, blood offerings and an incantation courtesy of Tumblr — to summon the moon.
Unfortunately for them, the spell works. The moon vanishes from the sky, shows up in corporeal form in Jen’s bedroom and refuses to return to her thankless perch, where nobody even sacrifices virgins to her anymore. The girls have 10 hours to find her replacement, she says, or the world as they know it will end.
The novel is written in the breathless rush of adolescence — a white-hot folie à quatre fueled by nostalgia and milkshakes. Things get messy (and I’m not just talking about the plotting, which I do wish had been tauter, especially given the book’s brevity). But then, that’s how these friendships go sometimes: burning impossibly bright and flaming out like a supernova.
“They’d never, never be as real,” Goldie thinks, “never as fully alive as it was possible to be in Maycie’s falling-down old house in a bed with your three best friends, still young, still hungry, still flayed alive on the altar of being a girl.”
The Whitechapel Full Moon Society
by Elizabeth DeLozier
Much is made of the symbiosis between fantasy and romance, but I would like to put in a plug for that other intoxicating hybrid: the fantasy mystery, which infuses the hairpin pleasures of a whodunit with a bit of magic. In THE WHITECHAPEL FULL MOON SOCIETY (Dutton, 354 pp., paperback, $20), the thrills come from the hunt for the infamous Jack the Ripper. And you can probably guess, from the lycanthropic title, where the paranormal comes in.
Our heroine, Caroline, is the recently orphaned daughter of a debt-strapped nobleman. Forced to sell her family estate, she sets off for London hoping to find her beloved older brother, Charlie, who has stopped answering her letters.
The city is smog-choked and simmering with hysteria over a recent spate of murders. It’s also seductive — especially for a novel-obsessed girl who has long dreamed of seeing the world beyond her manor. When Caroline arrives at Charlie’s boardinghouse, the titular Whitechapel Full Moon Society, he’s not there. But there’s something fishy about the way the landlady and boarders — especially Rab, Charlie’s chemist best friend — dodge her questions. So Caroline gives them a fake last name and takes a job as the house’s maid, determined to excavate their secrets.
Caroline is not the most competent sleuth, but DeLozier paints her and the other Whitechapel residents with such warmth I forgave her fumbling, even when it gummed up the mystery. The author also brings great humanity to the Ripper’s victims, marrying supernatural terrors to the very real ones faced by women (especially single, economically vulnerable ones) — a story that tragically continues today.
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