Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
This time was going to be different. This time was going to be better. This time, I was going to be enough.Like so many of us readers, Ivy Gamble never had the chance to go to magic school and experience a magical fix for everything wrong in her life. Unlike most of us, she's not really allowed to put the dream aside and move on with life - her twin sister does get that, from her teenage perspective, and when this story begins years later, she's now a hard drinking, hard living PI, who resolutel...
This was a weird book. If you like Mercy Thompson or October Daye but wondered if someone could make it more melodramatic and awkward, you will likely enjoy this.Content warnings (view spoiler)[ cancer, loss of a loved one, statutory rape, abortion, alcoholism, emotional abuse, gore (hide spoiler)]Things that kept me from DNFing:-Nods at real teen troubles. I liked that we didn't infantilize teens or make magic school substantially different from regular high school.-It was fast. I got through i...
Books that are billed as “like The Magicians” are never like The Magicians in the right ways for me, but this is both like The Magicians in that “magic is actually kind of weird and gross and real” way, and it’s a compelling whodunnit besides. The solution was perhaps a tad obvious, but the emotional weight with which the mystery is treated–it is deeply rooted in the characters’ past traumas and dysfunctions and insecurities–made that matter less. The narrative voice is arresting, and the noir a...
Magic for Liars follows private investigator Ivy Gamble as she investigates a death in the Osthorne Academy for Young Mages, the workplace of her sister and a location she has envied for years. While she’s living a life she thinks of as simple, her sister is a famous and talented teacher. It is a murder mystery wrapped up in an interesting commentary on chosen one tropes and sibling rivalry, and it had me engrossed from start to finish. The thing I find the most entertaining about this book, in
I love the combination of magic with a PI and a murder case, so I was looking forward to reading this book. Unfortunately, I didn't love the book as much as I love the concept.I have low tolerance for characters (and people) who wallow in self-pity. Ivy, the PI and narrator of this story, is queen of the 'woe is me' category. Her whining is a constant throughout the story. I wanted to give her a shake and tell her to grow up, though with less polite wording.I loved the way the magic was handled....
Magic for Liars isn't what I expected it to be. I had impressions from other early readers that it would be along the lines of a murder-mystery in Hogwarts, which turned out to be less-than-accurate. Instead, Magic for Liars is about the lies we tell ourselves, and each other. It is about the disastrous things that result from these lies, no matter how well-meaning they were, or how innocent they seemed. It begins with the gruesome death of a staff member at The Osthorne Academy for Young Mages....
Magic For Liars may be set at a school of magic, but we're on notice from the very first page that this is not THAT kind of school:Now they were all downstairs at the welcome-back dinner, an all-staff-all-students meal that marked the end of the first week of classes. They'd joke there about house-elves and pumpkin juice -- or at least the freshmen would. By the time they were sophomores, that vein of humor was worn beyond use.After a bloody murder at Osthorne Academy for Young Mages (located in...