I enjoyed Magic for Liars, for the most part, though I'll admit I'm a little disappointed—I had high hopes for this one. I mean, how fun is that cover? And the title and premise are equally awesome. This is a fun read, but it has some flaws, especially when it comes to the MC.
Ivy is complex, and I liked her, but my god, I'm not sure I can say that she's a good PI. For one thing, she has a tendency to show important evidence to suspects, mainly in an effort to impress them or earn their affection. For another, she gets drunk every night, even while she's trying to work on the case—drunk enough that it impedes her deductive abilities in the moment and gives her a hangover that impedes her deductive abilities the next morning. (Honestly, I don't know much about alcoholism, but I'm pretty sure I can say that she's an alcoholic. Her worrisome relationship to alcohol is never addressed, though, which makes me think that the author didn't intend her to be an alcoholic—and that, if it's true, is a problem.) Finally, she's really... just... not... smart. I mean, she seems to be really clever when it comes to understanding what makes people tick and manipulating potential suspects into opening up to her, but she is absolutely terrible at solving actual mysteries. I picked up on one really important plot point in chapter seven (read: very early) that Ivy didn't figure out until chapter twenty-two, and when it comes to the murder, well. There's a point near the end of the book when the answer is staring you full in the face and you'd have to be really freaking obtuse not to see it (though actually, if you're paying attention, you'll have figured it out pretty darn easily five chapters earlier), and Ivy still has to have it explained to her. It's actually kind of impressive. So, anyway, I liked her, mostly. But all of this together meant that by the end of the book, I was having a really hard time respecting her.
There was also something in the writing that tripped me up, and it's possible that the editor caught this before the book finally went to print, but it was so extensive and embedded that my feeling is that, at the point when I got my ARC, it was a bit late in the game to fix things. Basically, the author seems to have trouble keeping track of where her characters are and what they're doing in any given scene: There were many moments—often multiple per chapter—when Ivy would, for example, enter the library and start spreading out her files on a table, and then one paragraph later, she'd be checking her phone as she entered the library. In one notable scene, a character is carrying a big stack of papers, and after a few pages of dialogue in which he definitely doesn't ~magic them away~, he departs with his hands in his pockets. There are a billion cases of this—continuity issues so large as to be disorienting. Inconsistencies like this would not fly in a film, and they should not be able to fly in a novel, either.
My final problem was the disappointment of the actual murder mystery. As I've mentioned, I figured a lot of things out earlier than I was meant to, which isn't necessarily a bad thing—but in this case, clues weren't subtly woven in to make me feel clever when I figured it out. Instead, the clues felt obvious, so it wasn't that I was smart, it was that everyone else was dumb. And in the end, even excepting the fact that I actually predicted a lot of things, the mystery was just really predictable. This mystery could have gone in a lot of different directions, and ninety percent of them would have been more original—and interesting—than the direction the author chose.
...Sigh. I mean, I know I'm complaining a lot, but I really did, for the most part, enjoy reading this book, which is why I'm giving it four stars! It is fun, and the mystery is absorbing (for most of the novel, anyway). And while the big reveal isn't original, the world is: I have never ever read a take on the "magic school" trope like this before. I also ended up really liking one particular character—someone I really, really didn't like until the last five chapters, so that was actually a kind of neat surprise. Listen, it's a fun read! It's not a great book, but it's a fun read.
Ivy is complex, and I liked her, but my god, I'm not sure I can say that she's a good PI. For one thing, she has a tendency to show important evidence to suspects, mainly in an effort to impress them or earn their affection. For another, she gets drunk every night, even while she's trying to work on the case—drunk enough that it impedes her deductive abilities in the moment and gives her a hangover that impedes her deductive abilities the next morning. (Honestly, I don't know much about alcoholism, but I'm pretty sure I can say that she's an alcoholic. Her worrisome relationship to alcohol is never addressed, though, which makes me think that the author didn't intend her to be an alcoholic—and that, if it's true, is a problem.) Finally, she's really... just... not... smart. I mean, she seems to be really clever when it comes to understanding what makes people tick and manipulating potential suspects into opening up to her, but she is absolutely terrible at solving actual mysteries. I picked up on one really important plot point in chapter seven (read: very early) that Ivy didn't figure out until chapter twenty-two, and when it comes to the murder, well. There's a point near the end of the book when the answer is staring you full in the face and you'd have to be really freaking obtuse not to see it (though actually, if you're paying attention, you'll have figured it out pretty darn easily five chapters earlier), and Ivy still has to have it explained to her. It's actually kind of impressive. So, anyway, I liked her, mostly. But all of this together meant that by the end of the book, I was having a really hard time respecting her.
There was also something in the writing that tripped me up, and it's possible that the editor caught this before the book finally went to print, but it was so extensive and embedded that my feeling is that, at the point when I got my ARC, it was a bit late in the game to fix things. Basically, the author seems to have trouble keeping track of where her characters are and what they're doing in any given scene: There were many moments—often multiple per chapter—when Ivy would, for example, enter the library and start spreading out her files on a table, and then one paragraph later, she'd be checking her phone as she entered the library. In one notable scene, a character is carrying a big stack of papers, and after a few pages of dialogue in which he definitely doesn't ~magic them away~, he departs with his hands in his pockets. There are a billion cases of this—continuity issues so large as to be disorienting. Inconsistencies like this would not fly in a film, and they should not be able to fly in a novel, either.
My final problem was the disappointment of the actual murder mystery. As I've mentioned, I figured a lot of things out earlier than I was meant to, which isn't necessarily a bad thing—but in this case, clues weren't subtly woven in to make me feel clever when I figured it out. Instead, the clues felt obvious, so it wasn't that I was smart, it was that everyone else was dumb. And in the end, even excepting the fact that I actually predicted a lot of things, the mystery was just really predictable. This mystery could have gone in a lot of different directions, and ninety percent of them would have been more original—and interesting—than the direction the author chose.
...Sigh. I mean, I know I'm complaining a lot, but I really did, for the most part, enjoy reading this book, which is why I'm giving it four stars! It is fun, and the mystery is absorbing (for most of the novel, anyway). And while the big reveal isn't original, the world is: I have never ever read a take on the "magic school" trope like this before. I also ended up really liking one particular character—someone I really, really didn't like until the last five chapters, so that was actually a kind of neat surprise. Listen, it's a fun read! It's not a great book, but it's a fun read.