Release Date: June 28, 2022
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult
Description
The suburbs, right now . . .
Ivy’s summer break kicks off with an accident, a punishment, and a mystery: a stranger whose appearance in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, heralds a string of increasingly unsettling events. As the days pass, Ivy grapples with eerie offerings, corroded memories, and a burning question: What if there’s more to her mother than meets the eye?
The city, back then . . .
Dana has always been perceptive. And the summer she turns sixteen, with the help of her best friend and an ambitious older girl, her gifts bloom into a heady fling with the supernatural. As the trio’s aspirations darken, they find themselves speeding toward a violent breaking point. Years after it began, Ivy and Dana’s shared story will come down to a reckoning among a daughter, a mother, and the dark forces they never should’ve messed with.
What makes this novel really worth reading is the way the women connect with magic. Magic here is an untameable force; it can be temporarily channeled, but not contained or kept. It has rules that you cannot always anticipate and reactions you cannot always recover from. If magic is a force of nature, spell-casting is attempting to direct a hurricane. Each woman has her own interpretations of and interactions with magic. To Fee, magic is a tool to help those in need and a weapon to keep the wicked at bay. To Ivy, it is a thrilling adventure, an act of discovery and growth. To Dana it is a fearsome thing that takes more than it gives and leaves wreckage in its wake. To Astrid it is the act of becoming a god and of reshaping reality to your will. To Sharon, it is nothing but a hassle, a thing that costs too much for what it offers. To Marion, it is power, control, and selfish desire.
Read the rest of this review at Tor.com.
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