Review: Illuminations

Illuminations by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun read. The protagonist, Rosa, is "ten, nearly eleven," and children around that age would enjoy it - the language is kept straightforward - but as an adult, I enjoyed it too.

Rosa is a good kid, not immune to a touch of jealousy and making bad decisions from time to time, but with good intentions, and she loves her family and they love her. The talking crow is delightful. Nobody is perfect, but everyone has a lot of good in them (apart from the non-human antagonist, and even it gets treated with some empathy for how it became what it is), and the overall vibe is of a hopeful, kind world; even the ruler of the city appears to be a good ruler, sponsoring valuable public works for the good of the people.

The world is enjoyable, too, full of small magics. The illuminations of the title are magical illustrations that do useful things like keeping away mice or preventing food from going bad quickly, and Rosa's family's craft is creating them. The specific forms of the illuminations mostly make no sense whatsoever, and that's part of the fun; one, for example, can be any kind of cat, as long as it has blue eyes. It turns out that Rosa's habit of doodling fanged radishes is very close to being a new kind of illumination that's just what they need to solve the problem they're facing (which could be taken as a convenient coincidence, but also might be some kind of subconscious talent at work, so I'll give it a pass).

The author credits not one, but two copy editors, and they have mostly done a good job, except that apparently neither of them knows where the apostrophe should go when a possessive noun is plural, either for a group, like the Merchants' Guild, or a family, like the Mandolinis' house; the placement I've just given is the correct one, but the book places the apostrophes before the "s" in each case.

If you enjoyed the author's A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking , this has a very similar feel. I enjoyed them both.

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