Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey (Tor, 2019)
★★★★☆
Finally reading this author, who’s so beloved at The Bookstore! Magic for Liars is a murder mystery set at a private magic school in California, told from the perspective of Ivy Gamble, a P.I. with no magical ability.
Ivy’s twin sister Tabitha is the one who got all the magic in the family, so Ivy has never felt like enough—especially in the face of their mother’s death from cancer. Solving the murder requires her to overcome seventeen years of animosity to understand what happened at the academy where Tabitha teaches. I found Ivy’s perspective relatable, and the exploration of the sisters’ estranged relationship highly compelling.
Much of Ivy’s character surfaces as she’s observing the students at the school. She’s competent at her job, and it’s satisfying to watch her manipulate her interviewees. She doesn’t always get what she wants—and given her Muggle POV, we’re never quite sure whether that’s due to the influence of magic or something else—but that only adds to the believability. Plus, after Proxy, it was refreshing to read a novel from the POV of an adult among teenagers (and with better prose…). Ivy’s bitter/bittersweet ruminations were some of the book’s most poignant moments:
I remembered what it was like, walking through my high school and feeling like everyone else’s lives had already started. There was the girl who was an amazing singer and played guitar outside at lunch, the academic kid who won an award at the national level for some kind of algae farm, the young artists who sat and moodily sketched their friends. I remembered looking at them, and then looking at myself, and wondering when the hell my thing would turn up.
My friends and I, we had all been looking for it. What would make us crystallize? Anything could be the Thing that started it all, that started our stories.
There were some places where I felt irritated that Ivy’s poor choices led her to miss clues, but even those scenes were character-justified, and served narrative purpose: Magic for Liars, at its heart, is about how we can be more than our choices. The book plays with the tropes of its genre—it’s as self-aware as Ivy, on her good days—in the service of a larger, incredibly compassionate motive. It’s a paean to forgiving ourselves.
And Gailey executes thoughtfully across the board. The teenagers they’ve written all feel like real people, and even minor characters are allowed moments of bravery and authenticity. The kids’ struggles are never minimized; traumatic events are (generally) treated as such. The Bay Area setting did not neglect the presence of gentrification. Even a throwaway comment about the academy’s windowpanes felt keen.
Not every scene or reaction felt fully realized, particularly toward the end, but this book manages to pack a lot in a little. On the whole: four stars.