tamaranth | 2025/073: Sorcery and Small Magics

2025/073: Sorcery and Small Magics — Maiga Doocy

“How can I stop doing something that I don’t even know I’m doing in the first place? It’s not like I’m sabotaging myself on purpose. The feelings are just there.” [p. 281]

M/M romantic fantasy. Leovander Loveage is brilliant at small magics, his cantrips and charms executed with musical accompaniment. Sadly, Leo's larger spells -- his Grandmagic -- never work out right. He's a student at the Fount, an institution where scrivers (like Leo) write the spells, and are paired with casters who execute them. Unfortunately, in their final year, Leo is not paired with his best friend Agnes but instead with his nemesis Sebastian Grimm, a past victim of Leo's practical jokes, who has little time and less patience for Leo's frivolity.

When they accidentally perform a forbidden spell (Leo expects it to change the colour of his eyes: it does not) they have to work together to fix the problem. Which entails a trek into the Unquiet Wood, where sorceries and brigands and monsters abound and the Wilderlands, where magic flourishes unchecked, loom close; an encounter with an excellent sorceress named Sybilla; and Leo and Grimm's gradual realisation of the exact nature of that forbidden spell...

Sorcery and Small Magics is told entirely from Leo's point of view, and it takes a while to unravel the trauma behind his determination not to perform Grandmagic, and the true emotions underlying his happy-go-lucky demeanour. He's not altogether likeable: he mistrusts his friends, but is happy to follow advice from shady characters encountered in taverns; he always makes the worst possible choice; he has little respect for the lived experience of others. Yes, there is loss and pain in his past, but he's had years to become a better person. There are definite signs of improvement by the end of the novel, though, and of a more serious and honest Leo.

This is the first in the Wilderlands trilogy, and I'm intrigued enough by the worldbuilding, and by some of the characters, to want to read the next volume.