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I am very glad Caroline Stevermer has a new book out and is Back on the Scene, but The Glass Magician feels like it's in a sort of weird place halfway between the kind of books I usually associate with Stevermer and the kind of books I associate with Current Marketable YA.
The premise: it's the Gilded Age, only the upper-crust are also magical shapeshifters, called Traders because they trade shapes with animals and also presumably because they have built vast robber baron merchant empires, although it's not entirely clear how these things are linked. Other people, called Sylvestri, have tree magic, and everyone else (Solitaires) has no magic and just goes about doing normal Gilded Age things. (The thing where every type of person has a Category that Starts with a Capital Letter is definitely one of those things I associate with Current Marketable YA.
Also, as a sidenote, Stevermer very assiduously introduces everyone by race and magical status -- 'a white Solitaire,' 'a black Trader,' etc. -- which, I do appreciate the earnest effort to make it clear that this is not an all-white cast, but because .a) she never references anything other than 'white' or 'black' and b.) there's no indication of how the entire separate magical caste system has affected nineteenth-century race relations and thus what race means in this context, it took me forever to figure out that was actually what she was doing and this wasn't some additional descripter to tag the type of magic. ANYWAY.)
Thalia, Our Heroine, is an orphan young stage magician who unfortunately has begun to suspect that she might also be a Trader, which would be deeply inconvenient for her career.
Other inconveniences to her career:
- the rival magician who has somehow managed to get a clause in his contract stating that anyone else who does the Bullet Trick in any major theaters of the syndicate is in breach-of-contract
- the manticores who wander the city attempting to drain the magic of inexperienced Traders
- the stage manager/mentor who is turning out to have Secrets
- the upper-class Trader potential love interest, Ryker, who wants to hire her to convince his headstrong teen sister Nell that she really doesn't want to become a stage magician, however much she might think he does
Okay, the upper-class Trader potential love interest is not actually an inconvenience to her career, but he is an inconvenience to me personally because he is such a Privileged Asshole YA Love Interest and I dislike him so much ... I deeply resented every second he was on the page. A pity, because I have in the past usually found Stevermer love interests charming!
Anyway, Stevermer is very good generally at fantasies of craft and I really wanted the book primarily to be about the conflict between Thalia's new magic and her career plans and stage magician-craft. And indeed, whenever the book is in fact about stage magician-craft, it's a lot of fun and I truly appreciate all the loving research that Stevermer has put into not just the techniques of the stage effects themselves, but also the practical and logistical and business elements of the stage magic community.
However, we don't get anywhere near as much of it as I would like; instead the book is primarily about her learning to tap into her new powers under Ryker and Nell's wing, and secondarily about attempting to resolve the issues with her stage manager while also solving a murder mystery, and not very much about Thalia's own dreams and drives at all. It feels like perhaps that part of Thalia's journey is intended for a second book?
In fact there's quite a lot that feels intended for a second book, as most of the major relationships are left somewhat unresolved and a bombshell reveal is dropped at the end that gives Thalia a clear Next Step to explore. I also kept expecting some kind of worldbuilding reveal that would at least a little critique the extremely rich Gilded Age Traders and their monopolies on powers and money markets, rather than representing them as pretty much uncomplicatedly aspirational, and this did not in any way happen ... but I would like to give Stevermer the benefit of the doubt on this and hope that she does intend to do so when she does the rest of the things that are not finished in this book. On the other hand, the book so far as I can tell is being marketed as a standalone, so who knows! I will for sure read a sequel if it happens, anyway; I really would like to give Stevermer the chance to sell me on this world and narrative even though this first book did not quite get me there.
The premise: it's the Gilded Age, only the upper-crust are also magical shapeshifters, called Traders because they trade shapes with animals and also presumably because they have built vast robber baron merchant empires, although it's not entirely clear how these things are linked. Other people, called Sylvestri, have tree magic, and everyone else (Solitaires) has no magic and just goes about doing normal Gilded Age things. (The thing where every type of person has a Category that Starts with a Capital Letter is definitely one of those things I associate with Current Marketable YA.
Also, as a sidenote, Stevermer very assiduously introduces everyone by race and magical status -- 'a white Solitaire,' 'a black Trader,' etc. -- which, I do appreciate the earnest effort to make it clear that this is not an all-white cast, but because .a) she never references anything other than 'white' or 'black' and b.) there's no indication of how the entire separate magical caste system has affected nineteenth-century race relations and thus what race means in this context, it took me forever to figure out that was actually what she was doing and this wasn't some additional descripter to tag the type of magic. ANYWAY.)
Thalia, Our Heroine, is an orphan young stage magician who unfortunately has begun to suspect that she might also be a Trader, which would be deeply inconvenient for her career.
Other inconveniences to her career:
- the rival magician who has somehow managed to get a clause in his contract stating that anyone else who does the Bullet Trick in any major theaters of the syndicate is in breach-of-contract
- the manticores who wander the city attempting to drain the magic of inexperienced Traders
- the stage manager/mentor who is turning out to have Secrets
- the upper-class Trader potential love interest, Ryker, who wants to hire her to convince his headstrong teen sister Nell that she really doesn't want to become a stage magician, however much she might think he does
Okay, the upper-class Trader potential love interest is not actually an inconvenience to her career, but he is an inconvenience to me personally because he is such a Privileged Asshole YA Love Interest and I dislike him so much ... I deeply resented every second he was on the page. A pity, because I have in the past usually found Stevermer love interests charming!
Anyway, Stevermer is very good generally at fantasies of craft and I really wanted the book primarily to be about the conflict between Thalia's new magic and her career plans and stage magician-craft. And indeed, whenever the book is in fact about stage magician-craft, it's a lot of fun and I truly appreciate all the loving research that Stevermer has put into not just the techniques of the stage effects themselves, but also the practical and logistical and business elements of the stage magic community.
However, we don't get anywhere near as much of it as I would like; instead the book is primarily about her learning to tap into her new powers under Ryker and Nell's wing, and secondarily about attempting to resolve the issues with her stage manager while also solving a murder mystery, and not very much about Thalia's own dreams and drives at all. It feels like perhaps that part of Thalia's journey is intended for a second book?
In fact there's quite a lot that feels intended for a second book, as most of the major relationships are left somewhat unresolved and a bombshell reveal is dropped at the end that gives Thalia a clear Next Step to explore. I also kept expecting some kind of worldbuilding reveal that would at least a little critique the extremely rich Gilded Age Traders and their monopolies on powers and money markets, rather than representing them as pretty much uncomplicatedly aspirational, and this did not in any way happen ... but I would like to give Stevermer the benefit of the doubt on this and hope that she does intend to do so when she does the rest of the things that are not finished in this book. On the other hand, the book so far as I can tell is being marketed as a standalone, so who knows! I will for sure read a sequel if it happens, anyway; I really would like to give Stevermer the chance to sell me on this world and narrative even though this first book did not quite get me there.
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I also expected the manticore hunter to turn out to be the love interest when he first appeared -- he seemed a much more Stevermer-ish kind of character, generally -- or at least to do something, but instead he mostly just did his job ... I mean, no shade to him! Doing your job is a good thing to do and he was very competent at it! However, narratively speaking, I expected more from him.
I did however love the giant stupid magic show at the end. Did it make any sense? Obviously not, why did the cops and the murderer even accept the invitation? Was it NONSENSE DRAMA using ELABORATE STAGE TRICKS? yes, and therefore I was super into it. :D
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I think there is a categorical difference between Books Set In A Time and Books That Interrogate That Time, and this one falls in the previous category? My own preference is for the latter, and I sort of expected it to be the latter, but it is the former for sure. I do wonder if she's planning a book two where we'd get more in-depth interrogation of the world.
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That said, it did really feel to me as if it was written with a book two expected, but perhaps not confirmed Because Publishing.
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