Magic for Liars: A Novel

Magical Murder-A Must Read!!! (Actual Rating: 4.5) I read Magic For Liars in one sitting---I couldn't put it down! Halfway through my power went out. No problem. I pulled out my mom's old vanilla spice candles and I finished this book by candlelight! Ivy Gamble is a Private Investigator who lives a normal, boring, (maybe a little lonely) life until she is hired to investigate a murder at the school where her sister works. 'The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages'. Not only does her distinctly un-magical self now have to deal with a very-magical case, but she also needs to navigate a reunion with her sister whom she hasn't spoken to in years. This book could have easily fallen into the same rut that so many books about magic schools do nowadays. Often they can become 'counterfeit Harry Potters' but this book didn't. However, neither did it ignore the influence the Boy-Who-Lived would have had on the students either. In the first chapter, it talks about how during the welcome back dinner students would joke about house-elves and pumpkin juice. But this linoleum-floored, blue-lockered magic school is very clearly not Hogwarts. A quote from Marrion Torres, the headmaster at Osthorne, sums the school up best. "At the end of the day, we're just a high school. (...) That means gum, graffiti, cell phones, sex-ed, stupid pranks, students smoking weed behind the bleachers." A refreshing and realistic change. I do wish we'd been able to meet more of the staff and students, but the characters we did have were fleshed out and amazing. Sarah Gailey also does a great job in making the reader doubt the accuracy of their guesses about who the murderer is. I must have gone back and forth half a dozen times! Although this is not a Young Adult book, I think readers of YA would enjoy this book as well as older audiences. I loved this book. I loved the characters, I loved the school, I loved the plot. The only problem I have is that I wish there was more. Thanks to Bookishfirst for this copy of Magic for Liars in exch ange for an honest review!!!

Detective noir in a wizard school, it was a cool setting and kept me going even when I felt like giving up on this story. Some of the characters were interesting to follow (Alexandria), whilst others were very flat, despite being a main person of interest (Dylan) and the slow pacing and tangential thoughts of Ivy were frustrating. All the excitement happens at the end, and leaves lots of unanswered questions, and you wondering what happens to the characters after the big reveal... A little unsatisfactory!

Magic for Liars throws off the notion that magic imbues people, institutions and settings with some kind of higher moral standard simply by virtue of its existence. The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages is no Hogwarts, rejecting the setup that everyone magical is automatically accorded a certain level of "goodness" except for the few (Slytherins) clearly delineated as evil. Author Sarah Gailey's magical teens are, first and foremost, teens. They - and their teachers - use magic as a tool. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, sometimes for the merely mundane. Locker graffiti, passing notes, keeping students away from the staff coffeepot...much to the chagrin of non-magical Ivy, who believes magical people should afford a weightier gravitas to their power. Against the backdrop of a gruesome murder, Magic for Liars forces readers to consider that magic is not a force for good - it's just a force, and whether it results in good, evil, or neutral actions is entirely dependent on the person wielding it.