Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos (Magic: The Gathering) by Seanan McGuire

 Where to begin? I never played Magic:The Gathering when it came out. I was in college and I loved D&D and my only thoughts of Magic when it came out was that it was like a dumbed down version of D&D and I snobbishly turned up my nose at it because it was for kids and its parent company bought D&D from TSR and was trying to ruin it with 3rd edition - I fully admit, I didn’t know anything about it, it was an opinion based on ignorance. My brother-in-law has been teaching me how to play Magic recently and I am realizing how wrong I was and how fun and complex the game is! 

From following her on social media, I was aware how much Seanan McGuire loved Magic, and I just adore Seanan McGuire’s body of work.  (Note: I review a bunch of her books so I am copying part of some of my other reviews here to save time.). She has quickly become my favorite living writer and I feel very lucky that she is so prolific. I was first introduced to her work when her book Parasite, written as Mira Grant, was nominated for a Hugo Award. I loved it and quickly devoured the Newsflesh series before I realized that Mira Grant and Seanan McGuire were the same person. 

I started reading her works under her own name, starting with Sparrow Hill Road, which is amazing, but I picked it because I was intimidated by her long running October Daye series. When Incryptid was nominated for the Best Series Hugo in 2018, I dove into that and I loved it! It is probably my second favorite series by McGuire (Velveteen Vs. holds a special place in my heart). 

And ever since I was little, I loved books set in magical schools. I still have my dogeared copy of The Worst Witch and have read it to both of my children. So when I found out my favorite author was writing a magical school book based on a game I liked I preordered a copy right away! Then I was lucky enough to get an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher. 

I loved this book so much! You don’t need to know anything about Magic to enjoy it (which is good, because I still don’t know that much lore about the game). 5 students from different planes of existence are recruited to come study at a magical university and they learn about each other and themselves in this book. The characters feel very real - none of them are perfect and they still learning who they are and what type of people they want to be. I enjoyed this book thoroughly and hope it sells well so that Ms. McGuire can write all the sequels she wants to!

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

 

I love my wife very much, and I especially love talking books with her - we both enjoy reading but we do it in our own ways. My wife reads what she likes but doesn’t often engage with genre conversations. 

My wife has enjoyed reading and listening to Ilona Andrews books for years but I haven’t tried any until now. In fact, a discussion of their books is how I realized that my wife doesn’t like secondary world fantasy, which I love. If it’s not connected to the real world, she doesn’t usually connect to it. 

When we had heard that Ilona Andrews had a new book coming out with Tor we were both excited to see what the they would come up with, and I was so happy when I got an advanced copy of the audiobook on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

My wife started listening to it first - and she noped out before she got halfway through. She didn’t care for the setting and was bored. Undeterred, I began to listen to it. I enjoyed it much more than my tie did, but I found it rather uneven. When a book is cowritten by two people, I shouldn’t be able to see the seams, but in this book there were sections that really felt like they were not written by the same person - there were some wild tonal shifts. The protagonist is from earth but someone got transported into the world of her favorite fantasy series. She has reread it so many times that she knows much of it by heart and starts to try to use her knowledge to cash in and make a name for herself as an information broker. 

The protagonist is by far the weakest and least interesting part of this book - the world she is in is much richer and three dimensional, and she is so boring and forgettable. Other than that, it is a fun book with excellent side characters. (Several of them had similar sounding names, which didn’t work well in audio.). 

One other minor complaint- this book doesn’t have an ending - it just stops. It is clearly the first part of a series, but instead of feeling like an exciting cliffhanger the ending feels like their typewriter just ran out of ribbon. 

I enjoyed this enough to look forward to book 2. But I’d borrow it from the library instead of buying it.