Remember when I reviewed The World and All That It Holds and I said how I was looking forward to my next book being a contender for the Queer Joy square? Remember that? REMEMBER THAT?
Well, that book was not only NOT a source of Queer Joy, it was a source of Queer Rage. It was a book that made me seriously consider just giving up reading for a while. It was a book that led to multiple rants. It was a book that destroyed my faith in the entire literary industry.
That book, my dear readers, was Remedial Magic by Melissa Marr and I hated it so very much that I’m actually jumping my own review queue to talk about it ahead of the audiobook I finished in the meantime. The whole world needs to know how much I despise this book.
There are many, many, MANY problems with Remedial Magic, but just as with my review of The Parliament, I really want to talk about the marketing.
Look at this book cover:
Isn’t that adorable? It has the cute little Sapphic hand-reach that I see on so many F/F romances these days. The cottage, the lines, and the title suggest a little whimsy. I’m expecting real cozy vibes. Spice level could be anywhere, honestly, but I’m expecting some pining, some sweet gifts or other little gestures. A certain amount of wholesomeness, even if there also ends up being some blazing hot sex.
Now let’s look at the description of the book:
“The Magicians meets One Last Stop in this brand-new fantasy romance Remedial Magic, about an unassuming librarian who 1) has fallen in love with a powerful witch; 2) has discovered that she is a witch; and 3) must attend magical community college to learn how to save her new world from complete destruction by New York Times bestselling author Melissa Marr!
Ellie loves working in her local library in the small town of Ligonier. She loves baking scones and investigating the mysterious and captivating in her spare time. And there is nothing more mysterious and captivating than the intriguingly beautiful, too properly dressed woman sipping tea in her library who has appeared as if out of nowhere. The pull between them is undeniable, and Ellie is not sure that she wants to resist.
Prospero, a powerful witch from the magical land of Crenshaw, is often accused of being… ruthless in her goals and ambitions. But she is driven to save her dying homeland, and a prophecy tells her that Ellie is the key. Unbeknownst to Ellie, her powers have not yet awakened. But all of that is about to change.”
Everything about this suggests I’m going to get a Sapphic romance with a heavy dollop of fantasy. The world-saving bit suggests there might be more plot than in a lot of cozy romances, but c’mon, our main characters are witches, one of them is a librarian, and while I’ve never been to Ligonier, I actually have friends who used to own a store there and I’ve seen their pics, I know that town is cute AF.
I’m expecting a dual-POV, since the book mentions both characters and their motivations, but I could also see this being a single-POV, focused on Ellie and the fish-out-of-water situation she finds herself in.
Sure, that “The Magicians meets One Last Stop” comp is giving me pause, because I did not enjoy The Magicians and while I did enjoy One Last Stop, I’ve since read/watched some pretty critical reviews that pointed out some problematic elements. Still, One Last Stop is a popular F/F romance, so if this is getting comped to that, this is going to be a F/F romance.
This is not a F/F romance because REMEDIAL MAGIC IS NOT A ROMANCE. The marketing is so offensively misleading that every single person involved in marketing it as a romance should be fired. This is a multi-POV contemporary fantasy with multiple romantic subplots, a few sex scenes, and some serious, serious relationship issues.
Most importantly (and this is a spoiler), it does not meet the single most important qualification for a romance novel: it does not end with a Happily Every After or Happy For Now.
Now, before you point out to me that this is the first book in a series (apparently a duology), and that “romantasy” seems to have a tendency to stretch out the wait for the HEA/HFN until the end of the series, or at least part way through, I’d like to point out that the place that the author leaves two of the three “romances” is not only not an HEA/HFN, it completely ruins my ability to believe in any HEA/HFN the author would find some convoluted way for the characters to achieve.
To be honest, for a book whose marketing wants to give me cozy vibes, it’s got some real dark romance boundary violations, but without going far enough that I could see it appealing to actual dark romance fans. It’s more like a problematic urban fantasy, where you don’t know if the characters will ultimately end up together but they have some sexy times along the way.
To demonstrate how I think this book/first half of a duology went so disastrously wrong, I’d like to parallel it with a queer fantasy romance trilogy that I think did a much better idea of balancing the demands of fantasy and romance: The Last Binding by Freya Marske (I could just as easily use The Kingston Cycle by C.L. Polk here, and honestly, I like that one even more than this one, but Marske’s series concluded more recently and is thus more fresh in my mind).
I had originally guessed that A Course in Magic (which this is the first book of) would be a trilogy, because it sets up three main couples, which made me think that each couple would get their own book, as in the other two series I mentioned above. But when I reached the end of the book and read the About the Author, it said “Remedial Magic is the first of two books in a witchy lesbian fantasy-romance series”, so I think Marr sees this as a duology that is primarily about Ellie and Prospero, with Maggie and Sondre and Dan and Axell and their romances serving supporting roles to this main story.
By the way, Maggie and Sondre are a woman and a man. Sondre is explicitly straight — he tells Dan he’s not into men. Maggie is implicitly straight — she thinks a lot about men in a romantic/sexual content and not at all about women. Maggie is explicitly cis — she talks about having carried her son. Sondre is implicitly cis — he’s definitely got a cis masculine body, but this is a fantasy world. Not that I would trust this author with writing a trans masc character, so I hope he is cis.
All this to say that while I am pansexual and thus open to any and all sorts of pairings in romance novels, why the heck is there so much page space dedicated to this apparently cis-het relationship in what is being marketed like it’s a Sapphic romance? This is made all the more offensive by the fact that I read this book in PRIDE MONTH (but at least it was published back in February). There’s so many gayer books I could be reading, but I’m here reading this.
Anyway, back to The Last Binding. Marske also gave us a story with three couples in a magic-infused Earth setting, although hers is historical rather than contemporary. But here’s how Marske did it:
A Marvellous Light: This book is focused on Robin and Edwin. IIRC, it’s dual POV. It introduces some of the characters who will be MCs in the remaining two books, but it is really focused on Robin and Edwin’s romance, along with establishing the meta plot. This book concludes with a HFN for Robin and Edwin, and a resolution of some elements of the meta plot, so that it feels like a contained story, even though you know there’s more to be resolved with the meta plot.
A Restless Truth: This book is focused on Maud and Violet. We learn more about a character from Book 1, and we’re introduced to another character who will be a MC in book 3, but it is focused on Maud and Violet’s relationship and moving along the meta-plot. Robin and Edwin are not physically present in this book but they are referenced.
A Power Unbound: This book is focused on Jack and Alan. All three couples are present in the book and working together to resolve the meta plot, but the relationship focus is on Jack and Alan. Our other four have some character/relationship development, so we can move towards what feels like a pretty satisfying resolution to the whole trilogy, but still the spotlight remains on our main couple.
As a romance reader, this is essentially what I expect from any romance series, regardless of the sub-genre or total number of volumes. I mean, if it’s a contemporary or historical (versus a fantasy or sci-fi), there may not be as much meta-plot; the characters are more likely to simply be connected by family, friendship, or even workplace or school ties, rather than a shared world-altering goal. But the structure remains the same: each book focuses on a specific pair of characters, usually with either single or dual POVs focused very closely on those characters (I don’t feel like third-person omniscient gets much play in romance because you really want that closer connection to the narrator, but I digress). Secondary characters show up as “sequel bait” and “cameos”, or as supporting characters, but they never take much focus away from the main couple.
Remedial Magic gives us six point of view characters. We don’t get Prospero narrating until chapter 10, so, since I put a hold on this book, waited over a month to receive it, and then did not re-read the blurb when it became available, I was really confused when the first few chapters mostly alternated between Ellie and Maggie’s POVs. Ellie was really into Prospero. Maggie was really into Sondre and seemed pretty straight. Not that romance characters need to only be attracted to each other, but 40 pages passed, then 60, and what I thought were my two main romantic leads hadn’t even met each other! At that point I re-read the blurb and I was like “OHHHHHH Ellie and Maggie aren’t the two lovebirds!”
As a fantasy reader, I expect that a series is going to establish all or most of its POV characters early on, so I can get different viewpoints on what’s going on as characters spend chunks of the story in different locations and gain different knowledge. And while I might start trying to guess early on who is going to get together, I’m primed for the idea that it’s not going to be solely narrated by two romantic leads.
I have a lot of problems with the “romantasy” genre (and that’s a subject for a whole other post), but this is a big one. These books are being marketed like romance, using romance-inspired covers, referencing tropes that are popular in the romance community, but they are often written like a fantasy.
And here’s the thing. I like fantasy! But if a book is being marketed to me like a romance, I’m going to go into it expecting romance conventions:
- A happy ever after or happy for now ending
- A primary focus on the couple on the cover
That’s not too much to ask, is it?
Ok, this review is already way too long, and I haven’t even gotten around to discussing my other huge freaking problems with it, so I guess I’ll just bullet-point them. But feel free to leave a comment if you want more details on any of this.
- It’s really poorly written. Lots of telling instead of showing. Lots of word repetition and repetitive dialog.
- It’s really poorly edited. There’s typos, awkward sentences, and things like a character taking a hat from a character who never had a hat. Little things that any editor should check.
- The world building feels really flimsy and left me with a lot of questions.
- This book was 300 pages long on my ereader. It was around 120 pages when we were finally introduced to any explicitly described people of color or non-binary people. Then we’re introduced to a whole bunch at once. They’re really badly described. Really. Badly. Like, full-body cringe badly. It felt like the author, or her editor, suddenly realized that our four main characters are all white and cisgender, and all the secondary characters described so far were white and cisgender, so they had better stress how DIVERSE this magic school is and it’s definitely not transphobic like THAT OTHER FAMOUS MAGIC SCHOOL we don’t want you to think about.
- No seriously, she referred to someone as “a non-gender-specific person”. That’s the only explicitly non-cis person with any speaking lines. They say two words. I’m just assuming their pronouns are they/them because we don’t get told and we never see them again, but a few pages later we see a character who “definitely signaled as possibly non-binary”. My non-binary spouse and I have not stopped mocking these two turns of phrase since.
- Speaking of diversity, there are no disabled people in this book. There is one person with a chronic illness. That person is healed immediately upon coming to Crenshaw, because witches are like Wolverine: they have a healing factor and they age slowly.
- Speaking of witches, the way magic works make these characters feel a lot more like wizards than the actual witches I know. Honestly at some point I need to sit down with one or more witches to see how they feel about the current trendiness of witch-themed books and all the different ways witchcraft is portrayed.
- Referencing all of the above, this book came out in February and I really haven’t seen anyone talking about it (I learned about it in a video about the problems with the publisher, Bramble, but it was mentioned off-handedly and I was like “Oh that sounds cute, I’ll give it a try despite all the trouble with Bramble” and I honestly, I should not have done that). I’d really be curious about how Sapphic, non-binary, POC, disabled, and witchy readers felt about this book, but I wouldn’t actually wish this book upon anyone, so I can’t ask anyone else to read it and give me their informed feelings.
Ok. Whew. This is the longest book review I’ve written in forever. Let’s wrap this baby up.
CWs and TWs: Y’all. Y’all. This book is just a bunch of red flags in a trench coat. There’s: kidnapping, coercive relationships, non-consensual voyeurism, abuse of telepathic powers, reference to abusive romantic relationships, chronic illness, mention of past death of parents, mild to moderate sexual content, I think there was some cursing, and also see above about how badly handled the descriptions of POC and non-cis characters are.
Source and Format: I read this as an ebook from Sno-Isle Libraries and I would like to once again say how much I appreciate my local libraries for saving me from spending money on bad books.
Book Bingo Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): Feeling Witchy. This book is proof of why I would make a bad witch, because if I had magic, I would hex everyone involved in publishing this book (don’t worry, I’d also hex, like, transphobic politicians and warmongers, I’d be so busy hexing I wouldn’t have time to write 2000+ word book reviews). But I borrowed this book specifically with the idea that it would be a fun, cute, sexy book with witchy vibes to fit this prompt.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 14 out of 25 prompts complete. 1 bingo.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 13 out of 25 prompts complete. 0 bingos.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 4 out of 23 prompts, 0 bingos.