The Ministry of Witches: A Cozy Fantasy Novel by Dael AstraMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
A frustrating mixture of original and needlessly derivative, well-edited but with one huge persistent fault, emotionally sound and then emotionally unconvincing, predictable and unexpected, and also overly wordy for my taste. It's hard to rate as a result.
I say "original but needlessly derivative" because, although I don't think this is actually set in the Harry Potter universe - HP is not the most consistent universe, so it's hard to tell for sure - it uses multiple terms from that universe: galleons and sickles (the monetary units), house elves, Whomping Willows, gillyweed, the floo network. None of these terms are even slightly necessary to the story that's being told - they could very easily be something else, and nothing would be lost - so it's risking a lawyer's letter for no good reason. The rest of the worldbuilding, though done with a light hand, is sound and original and fit for purpose, so I haven't given it my "weak-worldbuilding" tag.
There are very few editing errors, and the big one that it does have is something many people won't notice, because almost nobody understands how the coordinate comma rule works. The simple explanation is that English has a preferred adjective order, which goes "number-opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose," and if you have two adjectives that are in different categories, they don't need a comma between them, because they can only go in that order and feel correct; it's only if they're both in the same category that you need a comma, to signal that they're both, as it were, modifying the noun as equals.
This means, for instance, that number words like "single," "one," "two," "few" or "dozen" will basically never be coordinate and should not have commas after them. Nor should "each" or "own" or a great many other adjectives that this author sticks a comma after. I'm used to authors getting this wrong occasionally, especially in edge cases. These are not edge cases, and they're constant. I counted 40 instances in the first 10% of the book, which suggests that there are several hundred in total. It made it, for me at least, a chore to read. The most important part of the coordinate comma rule, and the one too few authors observe, is the part that tells you when not to use a comma, and this author has clearly never heard of it, and has faulty intuition on the subject to boot.
The author's style is lush, which means most of the nouns get at least two adjectives, sometimes three, and they almost always get commas between them, and about 70% of the time they shouldn't. It's wordy in general; repetitive (it's hammered home at least once too often that Aleda isn't doing command-and-control but empathy and empowerment), and, for me, outstayed its welcome by having too many wrap-up chapters after the main resolution. I personally prefer a compact style, and this is the opposite of that.
Multiple chapters should begin with the word "the," but oddly do not. Something to do with the drop caps, perhaps?
Anyway, the story. The protagonist, Aleda, is a humble gardening witch who is suddenly elevated to Minister of Witches (why that title, when it's neither a national office, nor British, but part of the government of New York City, and when male magic users are called wizards?) by the invocation of a peculiar old administrative rule on the departure in disgrace of the previous minister. The previous minister was a corrupt politician whose "modernizing" over a 20-year period has thrown the whole magical system out of whack, though the consequences of this mostly seem to be low-key disturbing and disruptive rather than, at least so far, catastrophic, even though the Ministry is supposed to head off catastrophes, and we later see it doing so. With her gardener's intuition, Aleda is able to restore the magical ecosystem to balance, in a series of emotionally sound and believable events. (view spoiler)
Continuity is not a strength. After the Board does the thing that gives Aleda the "Minister" title, they are never mentioned again except in reference back to that event, and their members (apart from one) never play any further role. The number of people on the Board also seems inadequate for the number of factions that are later described. There are several continuity issues within a chapter, too, such as when someone says "We did it!" and, after another couple of lines of dialog separated by a lot of descriptive waffle, several pages later, '"We did it," Aleda corrected.' Except she isn't correcting, because that's exactly what the other character said. It feels like things have been changed in editing and the rest of the chapter still left with the earlier version, creating a contradiction if you're reading closely.
It is absolutely cozy. There's an enchanted tea trolley that dispenses the exact beverage you need for the mood you're in. There's a wise cat. It is as cozy as you could possibly wish, and the crises are solved not by power and control but by listening and empathizing and finding ways for systems and people to work together. That part is great. It just falls into the all-too-common basket of "could so easily be so much better" because of completely avoidable faults: the unnecessary use of terms from another author's universe, the constant muffing of the coordinate comma rule, a predictable trope signalled far too clearly far too early, some emotional shifts that I didn't feel were justified well enough, minor continuity glitches, wordy prose that could stand tightening. The right developmental editor and (please) copy editor could make this amazing with relatively little work. As it stands, it's an awkward mixture of rare strengths and unfortunate weaknesses, and the weaknesses land it in the lowest (Bronze) tier of my annual recommendation list.
I received a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and further changes may take place before publication.
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