Tropes: good witch, the quest, hidden truth, price for winning
Publication Year: 2021
CW: violence
thestorygraph.com description
A rich, dark urban fantasy debut following a teen witch who is given a horrifying task: sacrificing her first love to save her family’s magic. The problem is, she’s never been in love—she’ll have to find the perfect guy before she can kill him.
After years of waiting for her Calling—a trial every witch must pass in order to come into their powers—the one thing Voya Thomas didn’t expect was to fail. When Voya’s ancestor gives her an unprecedented second chance to complete her Calling, she agrees—and then is horrified when her task is to kill her first love. And this time, failure means every Thomas witch will be stripped of their magic.
Voya is determined to save her family’s magic no matter the cost. The problem is, Voya has never been in love, so for her to succeed, she’ll first have to find the perfect guy—and fast. Fortunately, a genetic matchmaking program has just hit the market. Her plan is to join the program, fall in love, and complete her task before the deadline. What she doesn’t count on is being paired with the infuriating Luc—how can she fall in love with a guy who seemingly wants nothing to do with her?
With mounting pressure from her family, Voya is caught between her morality and her duty to her bloodline. If she wants to save their heritage and Luc, she’ll have to find something her ancestor wants more than blood. And in witchcraft, blood is everything.
What I Rated:
Cover: 5.0/5
Story: 3.0/5
Pacing: 2.0/5
So Good I Forgot The Outside World Existed: 2.0/5
Gave Me All The Feels: 2.0/5
Snap counter: 29 (Special addition for annoying overuse of this word)
What I Think:
Blood Like Magic is a fictional young adult fantasy novel set in future Canada. The novel is appropriate for its target audience and has a content warning about the violence depicted in the story.
Voya Thomas is a 16 year old Black girl/aspiring witch, living in Toronto, Canada in the year 2049 with her blended family.
With the rating systems and the advanced technology powering everything, this story was giving “Black Mirror” meets “Sabrina The Teenage Witch.”
I really loved the cover of the book and the concept of a Black teenage witch. Particularly one whose personality actively defies the strong independent stereotype that often gets applied to Black women. And that’s where anything resembling enjoyment stopped for me.
If I had to use two words to describe this story, they would be dry and clumsy. The setting and characters were interesting enough to be able to craft a pretty juicy story, but the plot fell apart after we learned that Voya was given the task to “find her first love and destroy them,” and never seemed to really recover.
Throughout the book, Liselle also tries to touch on topics that are quite important to many people, particularly those from marginalized communities, but the way she writes makes it awkwardly and painfully obvious that this is happening. It came across as pretty unnatural.
I got the sense that she was writing as though trying to educate people who hold dominant identities in society about those different from them, and as a person with a number of marginalized identities, I have a strong personal distaste for this. It makes me feel like the story of my life is being measured by how much I’m able to explain it to and include someone who sees me as something other or foreign.
In the early 1900s W.E.B. Dubois coined the term double consciousness, a description of the internal conflict African Americans experienced, of always looking at themselves through the eyes of a racist white society, and measuring themselves through that lens. Probably without her meaning to, evidence of this self-examination comes through in Liselle’s writing.
The second place the author loses me is in how she uses exposition (a literary device that conveys key information to the reader either directly or indirectly). Unfortunately Liselle chooses direct exposition, and a story told in first person, and in doing so she creates a very unnatural protagonist.
Essentially quite a bit of Voya’s internal monologues about her world double as an explanation for the reader. And since people don’t generally walk around narrating their lives and explaining details of their lives that they would already know to themselves, it didn’t work well here. And it slowed the pace of the story significantly.
For example in the beginning of the story Voya is going through an abbreviated version of a typical grooming ritual, and in her thoughts she is describing what the ritual typically looks like (why would she do that unless her internal monologue is functioning as an explanation to the reader about a typical hair routine for a Black girl), as she takes note of the fact that she won’t have time to do it that day.
In keeping with these painfully obvious descriptions that she provides the reader, there is also so much unnecessary detail, that at times it felt like I was wading through a long list of things I didn’t care about to get to the good stuff. Like the history of the architecture of the buildings in the neighborhood or the kind of marshmallow topping on her hot chocolate. Or the groundbreaking observation that there are different kinds of Black people or the ingredients inside of a black cake. I’m sorry to say that none of these incredibly descriptive paragraphs did anything to further the plot.
The dialogue also felt unnatural and not at all like how people normally interact with their loved ones. There is a particular point in the story where Voya and her love interest have a very frank conversation about some important details, and my god, the exchange is so underwhelming and strange, that it essentially kills what was a pivotal point in the story.
It also took a long time to get to a point in the story where things got interesting, and then after that it moved so quickly, and there were so many muddled moving parts that then had to be explained in great detail in order to wrap the story up in a coherent way.
I really searched for something other than the cover that really captured my interest, and I would have to say that it was the character who turned out to be the most compelling of all, the grandmother. Ava, whose backstory would’ve made for a much more interesting story I think, or even a good prequel. Most of the other characters, including Voya, felt like they were missing moments that could’ve gone further to show us who the story was telling us they were.
Overall I walked away from Blood Like Magic feeling disappointed. I really like Liselle, and I follow her on YouTube. She has such a sweet personality, and I do think she knows her stuff when it comes to writing, but this book was a couple more rounds of editing away from truly showing that. I have hopes for the sequel, which is next on my list.
