The Magicians and Mrs. Quint
At first all I could see where the parallels with Jane Austen’s
Pride & Prejudice, in
The Magicians and Mrs Quint, by Galen Beckett, but they fell away. While the era it reverberates with to me is definitely the Regency era in England, the story is at the same time familiar, and strange. When the characters discuss something that in our world would be unusual, in the most normal way one is jarred away from the everyday Regency path. The characters can’t be certain the amount of day or night they will have, except by an almanac. A night may be 30 hours long, and a day less than eight hours of sunlight. And yet this oddity is not ruled by the season or any obvious astronomic explanation.
The story begins with a family just hanging on to gentility, just barely staving off the poorhouse. The father was a magician, until an event working with “magick” cripples his mind. The wife will not have magic spoken of in the house, but the oldest, most sensible sister of three, is fascinated with it, and reads as many books on it as she can in hopes of helping her father. The only thing odd about this is that she’s a woman. Women cannot work magic, of course, or so it is said.
Additionally, two young men who are friends, one attempting to find the financial means to return to College, and the other living a frivolous life, with occasional demands from his father to take on responsibility, go down their paths. While the poor one moves on the edge of conspiracies to make ends meet, the other begins to find magic invading his life.
This is an intriguing book with appealing language and the sparkle of magic. It also has appealing characters, delightful turns of phrase, and plot that never quite moves as you think it will.
Book review of The Magicians & Mrs Quent by Tammy Moore on the SF Site.
