First and foremost, thank you so much to Penguin Teen for sending me the e-ARC of this witchy novel. While I always appreciate the chance to work with Penguin, this one ended up not exactly being my cup of tea. However, I’ll tell you more because it’s possible it will be your cup of tea.
It may come as a surprise to a few of you (because I can be a little ruthless at times), but I actually don’t like writing negative reviews. I know a lot of hard work goes into writing a book, and I always enjoy discovering great new works that I can recommend to people. But at the end of the day, what I do like is being honest, and my honest thoughts are that this one was not for me.
A Wicked Magic is a fantasy-thriller by debut author Sasha Laurens that was billed as “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” meets “The Craft”, in which best friends Dan and Liss become naive witches by summoning their powers from a mysterious spell in a mysterious book that they find mysteriously abandoned outside a local store. But when their forays into magic end with Liss’s boyfriend getting snatched by a demon henchwoman, their friendship splinters. But Liss is determined to save her boyfriend, roping Dan back into her orbit along the way. A third character, Alexa, comes by her magic in quite a different way, and after becoming Dan’s new friend at school, gets tied into Dan and Liss’s magical expeditions as their lives and spells and pursuits all intertwine.
There are pros and cons to everything. The pros of this book? It had a wonderful setting, a cool concept, mental health rep, and an animal companion character that was probably my favorite since Bone Goat the undead goat in The Bone Houses.
So let’s begin there, shall we? With the pros. I loved that this novel was set in the North Coast of California and thought the author did an excellent job with the descriptions and setting the scene. The foggy nights, the dangerously twisty roads, the dark ocean looming in the distance, the pygmy forest where they summon a spirit. I could see it. I could smell the salt air. The locals made the town come alive. The setting was amazing.
The concept of this is, on the surface, exactly the type of thing I would usually be into: witchy adventures, ordinary lives being infiltrated by magic, and trickster demons. But in execution, I just didn’t end up liking it much, for several reasons I’ll get into later.
There was some LGBTQ rep in this novel, as well as actually a lot of mental health rep, which is refreshing and important to see in YA novels. While I can’t speak to the accuracy of some of the rep, such as in the case of Liss, who suffers from OCD, I thought a lot of the anxiety and depression representation was very accurate, especially the spiraling, cyclical thoughts that Dan battles on a regular basis. Dan also struggles with self-harm, and Alexa has her own battles with the trauma caused by the awful things her family has done in the past and the way she was raised up until moving in with her aunt Lorelei, who she lives with in the book. I really liked that there was mental health rep here, and that and the setting were my two favorite things about the book, honestly. (For those of you looking for trigger warnings, I’d say anxiety, depression, PTSD, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and suicide.)
Other than the MH rep, I just had a hard time getting into this book, and a big reason for that was the characters. Even though they had some realistic struggles, a lot of times they didn’t seem like real characters that I could get on board with so much as they seemed like stereotypes. Part of it is that I don’t want to see characters who are only their mental health struggles, and at times that was the only thing that stood out about the girls while everything else was just kind of a cardboard cutout. As you know, I’m a very character-driven reader, so when I don’t really care what happens to the characters, I can’t get into the plot, either, and that’s kind of what happened here. Liss oftentimes seemed like the stereotypical Regina George mean girl, Dan often seemed like the stereotypical kind of punky counterpart to Liss, and Alexa was just kind of…there a lot of the time. There was this whole passage where Liss was internally bitching about how Dan just didn’t understand that she couldn’t put time into their friendship because she had a boyfriend now and she had to commit her time to her boyfriend and it just felt so…flat. It felt like some mean girl trope from a 90s movie or something, and I found it hard to suspend the disbelief that anyone is really like that. I usually enjoy flawed characters, but these girls were at times so unbearable that I crossed the line from “flawed in a way that makes them interesting and makes me want to keep reading” to “so awful I have to force myself to keep reading because I’m not emotionally invested in anyone here.” Maybe other people will like them a lot more, but they just fell so flat for me.
Honestly, the best character in the book is definitely Domino, Alexa’s familiar cat, and perhaps that’s why he got the cover. I’d read a whole origin story on Domino, to be honest, before I’d invest my time in another journey with the three human girls.
I also found the “magic” portion of the book just…underwhelming. Some books describe magic in such a beautiful and lively way but this was another case where it was just sort of there, and I wasn’t very excited by it at any point. Perhaps it was just in the way it was written, because I found the writing to be at times somewhat clunky and awkward for my tastes.
So again, I feel kind of bad, but this one just didn’t pan out for me. However, I think this might be one of those books where maybe it’s just not my taste and most people end up loving it. It just didn’t end up being the fantastically witchy, beautifully magic journey I’d hoped for.
Star-wise, I’d say maybe like two and a half out of a five, putting me solidly in the middle. The redeeming qualities of the beautiful setting and the good MH rep brought it up, but the clunky writing, otherwise flat characters, and underwhelming magical aspects weren’t enough for me to give it more than that.
But hey, as Lavar Burton would say, you don’t have to take my word for it. You may like this one if you’re looking for a witchy YA where otherwise normal teen girls find themselves roped into magical and demonic happenings. Probably a good fit for you if you liked books like These Witches Don’t Burn or The Babysitter’s Coven.
What did everyone else think? Did you enjoy this one more than me? Are you adding it to your TBR? Would you read a whole story about Domino the Cat? Let me know! <3