Woot! First review of the year!
I must have read a review of Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown on here (perhaps yesnopemaybe‘s), and so thanks for that. Zacharias Wythe, a formerly enslaved Black sorcerer has been named the Sorcerer Royal of the Unnatural Philosophers, a group that regulates magic in England. His ascendancy is the source of gossip due to his race and the manner in which he claimed the title and machinations by the other sorcerers. To make his job worse, magic is and has been declining in England for some time. He accepts an engagement to speak at the Mrs. Daubney’s School for Gentlewitches in order to sneak over to Fairyland to try to identify the cause of the loss of magic.
Mrs. Daubney’s, and other similar institutions, were established to teach girls to control and, ultimately, vanquish, their innate magical powers. Prunella Gentleman is a resident at Mrs. Daubney’s; a mixed-race orphan who was left with Mrs. Daubney as a child. She has outgrown the educational function of the institution and her impressive thaumaturgical powers were never effectively curbed; for that matter, neither was her temperament. She is a charming, loyal, funny, inventive, independent young woman of a stripe we’ve seen in other novels, but she is a very enjoyable version of this character.
Zacharias and Prunella meet, somewhat unfortunately, and he realizes that girls and women may be part of the answer to the question of the dwindling power of magic – perhaps better cast, as he learns, as a loss of magic among men. Their adventure in magical Regency England with its institutional racism, misogyny, power struggles, and international conflicts is quite fun, mainly because the characters are so delightful, the world building is deftly done, and the magic mechanism works ok. Further, Cho’s description of the feeling of doing magic was magical in itself! I am looking forward to more of her work.