November 4, 2022

I admit it: I spent the vast majority of my childhood and adolescence wondering what it would be like to go to magic school. (Okay, fine! I still think about it sometimes.) But then another, more cynical part of me thinks that magic school sounds like a terrible idea: thousands of teenagers all crowded together doing teenager things except with potentially out of control and deadly magic? No thank you. For a while, those two options seemed like the only ones: wondrous possibilities or fatal chaos. But then I read Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey and found an entertaining balance between the two.

Ivy Gamble is normal. She lives a normal life as a private investigator, spending her days taking incriminating photographs of cheating husbands and arguing over payments from devastated clients. There’s nothing magical about her life, and Ivy is fine with that. Her twin sister Tabitha, though, is magic and teaches at the Osthorne Academy of Young Mages. When a faculty member there is brutally murdered by impossible magic, Ivy is hired to find out what happened and who the killer is. But entering the magic world and reuniting with her sister after years of willful separation is not easy. The world of magic is a tempting one, one that was almost Ivy’s, and the more time she spends there, the more secrets she uncovers, the harder it is to stay true to herself, whoever that is.

First of all, while Sarah Gailey’s books have been on my radar for a long time, I would never have read Magic for Liars right now if not for Lisa and Robbie from the We’re Doing Fine podcast and their awesome book club. You can check out a link to the podcast episode at the end of this post.

I loved Magic for Liars. As I said, it is the answer to the balance between magic being wondrous and magic being deadly. The characters felt authentic and grounded in reality, the magic system was soft without being confusing, and the plot was engaging without being overly complicated.

I think what really sold the book for me was how real it felt. There were all these cool, wondrous things surrounding the characters, but it never felt forced and it never felt out of place. Ivy is a PI, a super cool, often glamorized career. Except, it sucks. She’s eternally broke, struggles to deal with her clients, and is more than a little tired of taking pictures of husbands screwing their secretaries. She both yearns for something more, something like solving a murder, but at the same time loathes the idea of making the effort to change her life around. Nothing sticks, she thinks, so why bother trying. Then, we have Ivy’s relationship with her family, and though Tabitha is the only family member to make an appearance in this book, Ivy’s parents and her childhood have repercussions that ripple throughout the present narrative and have a direct impact on the events there. Ivy’s character doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She comes, from page one, with enough baggage for a whirlwind European vacation, plenty of flaws, and plenty of agency, whether she acts on it or not. She is human, starkly so because she is on the fringes of the magical.

Let’s talk magic. There are hard magic systems and soft magic systems. That’s a whole giant discussion on its own, so just know that hard magic equals strict and clear rules and soft magic equals fluid or minimal rules. Magic for Liars has, as far as I can tell, no rules to the magic. How is that possible when the setting is a literal school for studying rules of magic? Well, the rules are there, and referenced, but never once explained in great detail. I honestly have no idea how the magic system works. The focus of this book is not the magic. No, no, not even when there is a magical murder committed by a magical person at a magical school. The magic system is there to act as an aid in the exploration of human nature, motivation, desperation, and relationships by amplifying situations encompassing those things in a speculative manner. The softness of it is deliberate, the lack of detailed rules actually more poignant. Ivy, our viewport into this world, is not magic. She doesn’t understand magical dyna-whatever, and so neither do we. And in the absence of great magical details, we are instead left with grounded characters and situations that we can better relate to. The magic system, or lack thereof, helps readers find relationships with the characters and the plot by not getting in the way while it highlights them for you.

On a final note, I want to talk about the plot. This is detective fiction, a murder mystery. Generally, those two genres are not my favorite. Why? Either they are so overly complicated that I can’t possibly have ever followed along with the mystery and solved it, or they are so glaringly simple that I guessed the ending after the first page. Magic for Liars struck a weird balance between the two for me. I guessed part of the ending before I even started the book, and the rest of the ending before I was even halfway through. But this was not a bad thing! I didn’t care that I knew because the plot was still so entertaining. I still wanted to see how it played out, how Ivy would figure it out, and how she and the other characters would react. Gailey creates an entertaining plot, not a complicated one, and they lean into that aspect of the style rather than try to force more complications, more mystery, or more twists into the narrative. Remember: it’s not about the magic, so it’s not about the magical murder. It’s about the people, their relationships, their trauma, and how they all interact together to either create something great or destroy what’s left. Know the ending or don’t know the ending, you’re still left with an amazing experience.

I highly recommend snagging a copy of Magic for Liars. Sarah Gailey is now one of my favorite authors, and I will definitely be checking out more of their books in future. If you grew up on tales of magical boarding schools and are now an adult facing down the very real world, then this book is for you. It speaks to that unique childhood and adulthood combination in the best way I have ever seen. 

Don’t forget to check out Lisa and Robbie’s book club discussion of Magic for Liars AFTER you read it. Be warned: There are spoilers ahead:

We’re Doing Fine Book Club Episode: Magic for Liars

Learn more about Sarah Gailey HERE