Review: Radical Magic

Radical Magic by Kate Macdonald
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

For an otherwise mostly well-edited book, this has a surprising number of places where the "let's eat Grandma" issue occurs (lack of a comma before a term of address). Note that I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and this (and the places where the present tense drops into past or otherwise glitches, and the occasional missing punctuation, and the less occasional missing words in sentences) may be fixed by time of publication.

The story has several different viewpoints that slowly draw together, although none of the viewpoint characters have the full story of anything, and they don't know until nearly the end that they are connected. Viewpoint one is Conny, whose husband foolishly tried to excavate a fairy mound and was taken as a result. Viewpoint two is her husband Edward, enslaved and abused by the fae (known as elfin to themselves and fairies to humans, but I'll just say fae to make it less complicated). Viewpoint three is Auberon, the fae gentleman who owns the mound in question, who is moving around undetected in human society, learning ideas about liberty while seducing various humans, and decides that he will free his slaves. Unfortunately, his malevolent steward takes advantage of the unspecific nature of the command he's given, and releases Edward not back into 1807, where he came from, but into an unspecified year in the 20th century. Fortunately, one of Auberon's former (male) human lovers has been gifted with the ability to travel through time on being sent away, and has set up a cross-time guest house to help unfortunates like Edward.

The other key characters are Pertinacity, a researcher into the fae, who meets Conny by chance at the Royal Society and forms a friendship and alliance with her, and Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of George III (an actual historical character, though somewhat changed for purposes of the story), who is dying of TB. The author takes as established historical fact the rumours that her elder sister Sophia had a child out of wedlock, and Amelia in her turn starts an affair with Auberon.

All of this is very promising. I enjoy Regency fantasy (not that this is quite Regency, technically speaking; the Regency began in 1811), and the author does a decent job of using a few turns of phrase and some historical and cultural references to evoke a feel of the period. Most of the book, too, is satisfyingly stitched together, with these people who have multiple points of connection (unknown to them) striving for their various goals in ways that will bring them into conflict or alliance.

Unfortunately, I felt that some of the plot problems were solved rather too easily by helpful characters or coincidence, rather than the decisions and actions of the protagonists, and the ending, rather than tying up all the threads, left several dangling unresolved. This is the main reason I've dropped it to three stars (from my normal starting point of four).

A bit of softness in the plot and some mechanical issues that may be fixed by publication don't add up to a bad book, and I can see a lot of potential here and would consider reading another book by this author.

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