We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune (audio)

Posted on August 3, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A bit of a complicated story for this one. I started it for the first time maybe six weeks again, and had to put it down about halfway through. On Liz‘s good review, I did decide to try it again, and got back on my library’s wait list. My track record with TJ Klune has been to passionately love almost everything of his, and fail to make it through the rest. This one was indeed worth reading (listening to), but I struggled with one rough part.

The world is ending. A black hole is scheduled to devour the earth, along with everything else in the solar system. Human society has reacted more or less as we might expect: many people take to looting, rioting, and general bad behaviors; some continue living on as if everything is normal; some seek their final, profound experiences, bucket-list-style. There is friction at those intersections. Our protagonists are two older men, Don and Rodney, who have been a couple for more than 40 years. (I think they are in their 70s, but I did not search up that detail.) They are making a cross-country trek in an aged RV, headed for the west coast, where they have an important task to complete, a promise to keep, the nature of which remains murky for much of the story, although there are hints.

Along the way, they meet people from the different rough categories I’ve drawn above. Some might call these ‘bad’ or ‘good’ people, or say that Don and Rodney have better and worse experiences with them, but, you know. People. It is in one of these episodes that I initially had to put the book down. (If you’ve read it, you can probably guess which one. At least it feels obvious to me!) Liz was right: the book moves again through light, through better experiences and better faces of humanity. The final revelations and final scene… are more uplifting, and certainly thought-provoking. There was much that was good to contemplate, and some of it was also good in that other sense. Klune does expose his reader to some darkness – that was not unexpected. Some of it hit me a little wrong, or more likely, a little at the wrong time in my life, but we got through.

“Luck,” Don said. “Rotten, shitty luck.”
Jerri laughed. “It is. So much. But here we are, strangers who never would have met. Maybe that’s what the point of all of this was. To have these random moments of collision, to learn from each other, to hear stories.”
“To live,” Rodney said.
Jerri looked back out at the animals. “I suppose you’re right…”

I really love this author. I remain on the edge of my seat for whatever he does next. I appreciate his take on grief, aging, and the end of the world in whatever form, and I trust his wisdom on these questions. (He is not so aged, just almost precisely my age, ha! but does have some experience with loss.) It’s a gorgeously written story, full of detail and specificity and beauty and wonder, and I’m not done thinking about it. I’m actually still thinking quite a lot about Take Me With You, and finding some parallels there. It’s a beautiful book. As ever, beware the darkness.

Also as ever, Kirt Graves’ narration is spot-on. I don’t want any Klune from anybody else.

Rating: 8 night swims.

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Dear Future Occupants by Keith Stahl

Posted on July 31, 2026 by pagesofjulia

An unusual family navigates small-town Connecticut in 1979 with wacky adventures, conflict, and love in this funny, affecting debut novel.


Keith Stahl’s first novel, Dear Future Occupants, relates the poignant, madcap adventures of a dysfunctional but essentially loving family. In March of 1979, Bud Sommer moves his family back to Greenhill, Conn., having inherited his childhood home, a massive, crumbling 17th-century estate. Bud, a sometimes painter and aspiring restaurateur, has also used his wife Rebecca’s inheritance to purchase a nearby diner. Joining Bud and Rebecca are their middle-school-aged sons, Victor and Wade; their eldest son, Herman, who has spent recent years hitchhiking around the nation; and the family dog, named The Dog. Victor, who has been bullied at school, begins running around with the “lav rat” kids, who smoke in the restrooms. Meanwhile, his little brother, Wade, a piano prodigy, experiences one accidental injury too many and chooses to wrap himself in bubble wrap around the clock. Long-haired Herman likes to wear women’s clothing, to the great distress of his parents. A literal skeleton is discovered in the basement of their dilapidated home, and a local adjunct professor moves in to study it. One absurdity after another plagues this motley household, until it seems that something will have to give.

The Sommers experiment with church, rehab, open mic nights, therapy, and a new business scheme that involves hiding buds of high-grade marijuana in boiled liver, thyme, and wheat-germ sandwiches. Stahl’s narrative shifts perspectives: Bud and Victor tell their first-person stories in alternating chapters, interspersed with Herman’s ventures in creative writing, which include short stories, poetry, and satirical news articles. Wade and Rebecca, as well as other colorful characters like Bud’s beautiful young waitress, Cassandra, and Victor’s school ally, Strom Luger, remain observed rather than observers. Stahl’s background in poetry colors his detail-rich descriptions of such zany episodes as family Wiffle ball tournaments, their visit from Child Protective Services, and Bud’s imaginative game of gruesome food-service deaths. The personalities of Stahl’s outlandish characters engender often surprising humor.

Against the backdrop of conservative small-town Connecticut in 1979, the Sommers grapple with concepts of family, sexual identity, counterculture, and drug and alcohol use. With pathos, humor, compassion, and great energy, this novel offers a moving examination of the meaning and acceptability of Herman’s cross-dressing and the value of family–in general and in this sweet, troubled individual case. The title of Dear Future Occupants refers to the marks left on the Sommer home; its story is arguably about the tension between conformity and authenticity in the Sommers’ impact on a larger world. The result is preposterous, exuberant, and tender.

This review originally ran in the July 6, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Easter eggs.

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The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley (audio)

Posted on July 27, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I read the first Flavia de Luce mystery many years ago. When I read recently that Alan Bradley had died, I felt moved to try the second. This eleven-year-old narrator and amateur sleuth is funny, impressive, indomitable, precocious, and very clever, but not precisely likeable. I keep coming up against this in my reading: I know likeability is not supposed to be a requirement for our reading enjoyment, but it sure does help, and in its absence, something else must step in. Here, happily, it was plot. I was drawn in by the twisting mystery and a genuine curiosity about whodunit (there being at least two crimes for which to assign blame), but I have to say, I don’t feel moved toward book three.

The problem with we de Luces, I decided, is that we are infested with history in much the same way that other people are infested with lice. There have been de Luces at Buckshaw since King Harold stopped an arrow with his eye at the Battle of Hastings, and most of them have been unhappy in one complicated way or another. We seem to be born with wisps of both glory and gloom in our veins, and we can never be certain at any given moment which of the two is driving us.

I like Flavia’s backstory, the murkiness surrounding her late mother, her beloved bicycle Gladys (which belonged to her late mother), and the difficulty with her terribly obnoxious two older sisters. The historical framing is pleasing, and the twistiness of the plot is expert. I think Alan Bradley was quite talented. I just don’t quite fall into line with Flavia herself – and everyone else in this world seems purposefully at least a little bit unsympathetic. I thought about putting this one down until maybe halfway through, at which point I was fully committed, and I don’t regret this time, but won’t pick up another either. So many books in the world, and clearly, there are many readers perfectly matched to this series. If you’re one of them, please come tell me what you love about it!

Rating: 6 beautiful laboratory instruments.

Addendum: Jayne Entwistle’s narration feels perfectly suited to me and I love her voices for these characters – full points for the performance.

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The Case of the Murdered Muckraker by Rob Osler

Posted on July 24, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following on the events of The Case of the Missing Maid, Harriet Morrow is working on settling in to her job at the Prescott Detective Agency. It is 1898, Chicago. Harriet is an outlier, as a young woman (just twenty-one years old) employed as a detective – a ‘girl detective,’ they call her. She is also an outlier in her preference for unadorned living, hard work, using her bicycle for transport – not particularly ladylike qualities, especially for her time – and she has recently discovered a preference for wearing men’s clothing. She is attracted to women, and in book one, began a romantic involvement with a young woman named Barbara Wozniak, a Polish immigrant. One of the throughlines of this book and this series is Harriet’s search for a place in a world where she mostly feels like she does not belong, does not live up to expectations. In one of the subplots of her investigation, in fact, Harriet will take to full male drag – a disguise, and a false identity as Harry Dunn. This strategy makes sense from an investigatory standpoint, and takes advantage of her large, sturdy frame. It also doubles as an experiment, and allows her to observe that she does not think of herself as a man nor wish she was one. She wishes rather for a version of womanhood that her society doesn’t recognize. Without putting modern labels on Harriet’s 1898 experiences, this nicely parses some aspects of her sexuality and sexual identity.

But ho, this is a mystery novel. The back blurb tells us that “Rob Osler writes traditional mysteries featuring LGBTQ+ main characters.” While I mostly agree, I think these facets of Harriet’s identity are more than a mere twist on the traditional genre. In The Case of the Murdered Muckraker, we do pursue the murderer of the muckraking journalist, and the evidence of political corruption for which he was killed. But the social issues creeping in there – political corruption, wealth and wage disparities, immigrants’ experiences, working and living conditions, and more – I think play a larger role than the ‘framing elements’ in a knitting mystery or a culinary mystery. I think this is a mystery novel inseparable from its historical setting, and concerned with social-political conditions and change. As well as the character arc of a young woman we would definitely call a lesbian in today’s terms.

Harriet is a delight. She is earnest and serious in her work – admittedly a pure amateur at detective work, but committed to the job, to serving justice, and to making her own way in the world. She is a head of household, providing for her sixteen-year-old brother Aubrey since their parents’ death, and did you catch that Harriet is herself just twenty-one? She and Aubrey’s relationship is not always smooth sailing, but it’s written with compassion for both of their circumstances. Her budding romance, though it doesn’t play a huge role in this story, is also told with nuance – I hope that plot thread will continue to play out. She is developing some meaningful friendships, too: the wealthy, older Pearl gives Harriet an important outlet, and then there is her friend and colleague Matthew, who is also queer. Osler is doing a lot of work with Harriet’s story: the mystery plots, the detective agencies, the social-political time-and-place setting which is super rich, and his main character’s own development, as a queer person and just as a person. It all feels pretty ambitious, but he has it all in hand at this point, by my standards. I can’t wait for book three – as yet unannounced, but surely?!

Rating: 7 sticks of dynamite.

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Enchantment by Riikka Pulkkinen, trans. by Tabatha Leggett

Posted on July 20, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A singular girl stars in this unusual novel of identity and mysterious death.

Riikka Pulkkinen (True) challenges readers to form their own impressions with Enchantment, a striking novel about girlhood, perception, and death.

“The sun is setting and they’re at the beach. The sky is soft mallow and bronze. It’s the last summer of their youth.” Pulkkinen, in an atmospheric translation from the Finnish by Tabatha Leggett, emphasizes this cinematic view. The next scene, almost a year later, is a forensic autopsy. Philippa Laakso, age 17, has been found dead in the courtyard of her apartment complex.

Philippa is the center of this novel; all gazes are directed toward her. Observations come in various formats: interview notes by police investigators, flashbacks, and descriptions of videos recorded by Philippa on her treasured Olympus PEN camera, a gift from her mother on her 13th birthday. Chapters take the close-third-person perspective of various characters, rarely including Philippa herself. She adopted several personae, beginning with “little experiments in selfhood; facial expressions, gestures, hair flicks, kisses blown to the lens, the camera, whose naive but fearless eye devoured stories without judgement.” Sometimes she co-created her online aliases with her longtime best friend, Saga, dark hair to Philippa’s fair, the other side of Philippa’s coin: “Two girls. Girl and girl. Me and me.”

Philippa is a perfect enigma to those left behind. These include a compassionate, poetic forensic pathologist, who “has always believed that the deceased have a right to carry the truth with them”; an elderly neighbor, a widower, whom Philippa befriended; a woman who appears in Philippa’s videos, screaming in rage; the older men she met via dating apps; the boy she dated seriously and recently broke up with; Saga, her friend and double; and Philippa’s mother, from whom “the girl had learned the art of being a matryoshka. Beneath one layer was always another layer–happy, funny, strange.”

Philippa has given the world many versions. She is a fantasy, a friend, a tormentor, an innocent, a vixen, a hero, a villain. “This girl is rarely considered wise, more rarely still intelligent. She can’t possibly be profound because she’s laughing in her pictures, pointing her chin downwards, like a child. She can’t possibly be reflective, not while she still treats these affects of hers as accessories.”

One of Enchantment‘s central concerns is the question of perspective, of what is possible to know about a person. Pulkkinen’s dreamy novel delves into the line between truth and fiction, storytelling and self-creation. Philippa invented herself, and in the aftermath of her life, police investigate the question of her death, as everyone investigates how to view her and how to remember her. She has “become a dream, gossip, stories,” and readers are left to parse the enchantment that remains.

This review originally ran in the June 29, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cars.

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Misery’s Wife by Joan Tierney

Posted on July 17, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Misery’s Wife is a lovely, off-kilter fable about family, sisterhood, love, transformation, and humans’ relationship with the rest of the world. It uses repetition and sets of threes in ways that feel familiar to a fairy tale tradition. I think I was expecting something referencing Persephone or Eurydice, but it turns out that Tierney here recasts a Portuguese folktale, with foods, names and language from that culture. I was unfamiliar but still found it all accessible and enjoyable.

We first meet the parents of three sisters. Agueda and Jaco have three girls, and during each pregnancy, Jaco goes on a mini-quest to ease his beloved wife’s discomforts, and each time, this results in the newborn daughter’s allegiance: Adelina is a child of the night and the sea; Borboleta is a child of the day and the sky; and Dores is a child of the wind and rain, “and Misery itself will bend to kiss her feet.” They grow respectively into a young woman who adores all things strange; one who admires and exudes beauty; and one who is mild-tempered and shy, given to daydreams. In a single day, Adelina elopes with the King of the Ocean. Borboleta runs away with the King of the Sky. And Dores declines the offer of the King of Misery, but he abducts her anyway.

Years pass. Agueda and Jaco mourn their three lost daughters. But lo (the book surprises us), there is a fourth, younger sister, a child of luck and fortune. “There was also the mistaken belief, in those early years, that Elixane was in fact a son rather than daughter… these things happen, and are remedied easily enough once the child themself can put voice to the truth.” As Elixane grows into a young woman, she receives three mysterious messages, one from sea, one from sky, and then a final message from the queen of Misery. “She asks that you find her and save her from her king.” As she prepares for this quest, Elixane meets Luck, who has (naturally) followed her all her life; he is accompanied by his sister, Jinx. Off and on, the pair will accompany her as she meets with each sister in turn, and endeavors to rescue Dores from Misery, as well as lifting a curse and generally improving circumstances in the kingdoms of sea and sky, and that of land and humans as well. Misery’s Wife is set in a future world badly damaged by anthropogenic climate change, which, like Elixane’s identity as a trans woman, is treated only glancingly.

I liked this story, although the stretches set in the kingdom of Misery were sometimes hard to read. I liked the representations of the love and devotion of family, of sisters and of friends, as well as the loving marriages (“When you marry someone, you marry their battles, too”), contrasted to Misery’s abuse (“Dores’s skin was pockmarked with bruises… The cat looked at the bruises and then looked at her eyes and said, ‘This is how it starts'”). I found the folk formula – repetitions in threes, quests and codes and riddles – soothing in its familiarity, which did not prevent plot twists. And I loved the decidedly happy ending. By that conclusion, I’d say that despite some comforting framing, Tierney has given us a surprising, thought-provoking fable that I will not soon forget.

Rating: 7 roosters.

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Take Me With You by Catherine Ryan Hyde (audio)

Posted on July 13, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I’m pretty blown away by this one, which seems to have hit me just exactly right.

We begin in scene, and put together details as we find them. A man named August is living, with his little dog Woody, in his RV where it is parked at a car repair shop; he wanted very badly to make it to Yellowstone this summer, but the cost of these repairs may make that impossible. He waits and worries. The mechanic, Wes, wonders if they might make a deal. His two young sons play with August’s dog. The two men talk. Wes is about to go into jail for a 90-day sentence and has no one to watch his boys. He suggests that Yellowstone may still be possible: he’ll do the repair gratis if August will take his sons away for the summer. This is a crazy idea on its face, of course. August is a stranger to Wes. But off we go.

August is a high school science teacher, and a recovering alcoholic, grieving the loss of his nineteen-year-old son almost two years previous. It doesn’t take much to put together that August will be moved by two slightly damaged, very sweet young boys (it’s not like August’s son was ever twelve or seven years old, August’s gruff AA sponsor points out with dry sarcasm), or that the boys, twelve-year-old Seth and seven-year-old Henry, are in need of a patient, stable father figure. Wes, it turns out, is an alcoholic.

August wondered if his job would be different if kids looked up at him with eager faces. And if even these two kids would have been the slightest bit eager for a science lesson if they had been in school. Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they’re sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we’ve removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it’s not the kids’ fault. Maybe we made the first mistake. “I’ll start with geysers,” he said.

The odd threesome (foursome, with Woody, who has much to offer) have a pretty great summer together, although punctuated by the challenges of August’s grieving and the boys’ pain. When Wes has gone to jail before, they entered a county facility, and Henry hasn’t spoken since. He speaks, very little, but does eventually speak, to August. The bond is delicate but undeniable. But he’ll have to take them home again.

Take Me With You is gorgeous, wise, funny, heartbreaking, and a lovely evocation of natural beauty in several of our national parks, and of the pain and joy of making connections across grief and trauma. We meet a few indelible characters along the way (and the AA community looks awfully good in this context, really), but mostly it revolves around August, Seth, and Henry, with Wes coming in for the occasional hard edge. There are no villains and no real heroes, although August’s impact on these two young lives is significant.

Everybody is a good person and a bad person at the same time. The only real variation is in the balance.

Jeff Cummings’ narration feels pretty spot-on to me, capturing voices like that gruff AA sponsor, troubled Wes, and the timid cartoon mouse of young Henry’s rare words, as well as August’s careful, intentional slowing down to take questions seriously even when it hurts. The novel is contemplative, lovely in its descriptions, and cautious about coming to conclusions. Some of the relationships it describes are impossibly tender. I would love to continue to know these characters, and will be thinking about this book for a long time. It’s been a special journey; I think it’s going to be one of my favorite books this year.

Rating: 9 pictures.

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Strangers Behind Closed Doors by Catherine Adel West

Posted on July 10, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: I was sent a galley copy of this book by a publisher’s representative in exchange for my honest review.

Giovanni Mason – Gio to her friends – is the chief concierge at one of Chicago’s most exclusive premier hotels, the Ivory. She was the first Black concierge of any kind, let alone chief, and she’s very proud of this accomplishment, even if her mother (a longtime Ivory housekeeper) hoped she’d wind up somewhere different. Detective Redding Stark has followed her father’s path with the Chicago PD. Like Gio, Red is a workaholic, whose commitment to her work has not always proved healthy. She remains preoccupied with the cold cases of five missing women – young Black women, whose disappearances have been far too easily forgotten by the system Red works for. Then a beauty influencer, who also happens to be Gio’s former best friend, vanishes from one of the Ivory’s extra-rarified upper floor rooms, a room now marked by broken glass and blood splatter. Gio fought with Natalie just hours earlier, and now has bruises on her wrists and no memory of a chunk of her evening. But Red suspects the chief concierge is innocent. She believes instead that Natalie’s case is linked to the others.

The two form, in fits and starts, a mistrustful alliance, motivated by concern that Natalie may be alive and in danger, wanting to prove Giovanni’s innocence, and wishing for justice for women who look like them. There are few people in either woman’s life whom they can trust. Instead, the Ivory Hotel and the Chicago Police Department are filled with politicians, social climbers, and the very rich. In chasing the truth, as they reveal plots, corruption, and double-crossings, Gio and Red place themselves in great danger.

Strangers Behind Closed Doors offers intrigue and action scenes by the truckload. Amid luxury suites, fine dining establishments and neighborhood classics, flower shops and cozy homes, fight scenes and family drama unfold. The impulse toward friendship between Gio and Red feels real, and poignant, even as both are limited by their own trauma. I was definitely propelled by the twisty-turny plot, which kept offering surprises. It was not completely without unbelievable details, but that’s not too unusual in the genre. The background big issue, that the disappearances of women of color are overlooked, is a point well taken. West’s Chicago is well done: it’s not a city I claim great familiarity with, but I recognized some landmarks, and it felt fully realized. I never stopped rooting for the two stars, even in their flaws.

Rating: 7 photographs.

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The Art of Charming a Changeling by Sylvie Cathrall

Posted on July 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A plucky art conservator must travel into Fairy lands to save her job and a dreamy Fairy imprisoned in a painting.

The Art of Charming a Changeling is an endearing, enthralling fantasy-romance by Sylvie Cathrall, whose imagination takes readers through Folk and Fairy lands, into a painting, and back again.

Florrie Hyverfell loves her work as an art conservator. It’s people she finds challenging. Constantly arranging her face, rehearsing conversations ahead of time, seeking out comforting textures, and managing her interactions with the world exhaust her. She feels fortunate to be employed by Prince Ardant at the Commonplace Palace Museum, where she cares for his extensive collection. He even shares her passion for Fairy paintings, which have become embarrassingly outmoded. The painting he cares the most about is The Resolute Portrait of Vibrant Lord Vernal Mauve Among the Ruins; but to her dismay, Florrie quickly determines it has been replaced by a Fairy forgery. Worse, the counterfeit painting is holding hostage a changeling, a minuscule, near-perfect copy version of Lord Vernal Mauve, who asks that she call him Vern.

Florrie feels a little overwhelmed. According to the Conservators’ Code (which she has memorized), “one must only introduce the mere possibility of a counterfeit after acquiring at least five forms of incontrovertible evidence.” To save her job, and to help Vern escape from the beautiful but closed world of his painting, Florrie is compelled to find the original stolen painting. To do so, she must travel into Fairy lands, where Folk seldom travel. Meanwhile, there is the utter allure and magnetism of Vern, and does he have tiny, impossibly adorable dimples?

Cathrall (A Letter to the Luminous Deep) invites readers into a curious world in which Folk and Fairies have parted ways, with Folk generally preferring simpler technologies (rejecting levitating carts because “nothing feels so real as a wheel”) and eschewing Fairies and their overly embellished art. Finding herself attracted to Vern presents another layer of difficulty to a woman who frequently struggles to find her way. But Florrie is stronger than some might think.

The Art of Charming a Changeling offers an absorbing foray into an imaginative setting populated by art-focused princes, haughty collectors and conservators at odds with one another, fanciful Fairies, and the occasional predatory duck. It contains a sweet and cozy romance, a woman’s journey of self-actualization within a society that undervalues her, and a whimsical fantasy of changeling art. It also features a quest, for those seeking adventure. This first in a planned series will leave all sorts of readers hungry for more.

This review originally ran in the June 23, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 seed-loaves.

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Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett

Posted on July 3, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Despite not being particularly fond of cats myself, I was charmed by this novel, which offers a few of my favorite Fawcett features: magic, family, wholesomeness, and a gentle arc from prickly acquaintances toward romance, in a cozy package.

Agnes Aubert runs a cat shelter in Montreal, in a version of that city where magic is present, but mostly hidden and only tolerated. She lost her beloved husband a few years ago, and his memory and her mission to save all the city’s cats (!) keep her going; her existence is rather spartan, and highly (you might say pathologically) organized. As a cash-strapped cat shelter (not the most attractive of tenants), she is having trouble finding new lodgings after a magical mishap destroyed her last rental. So she takes – with some misgivings – a suspiciously affordable place that turns out to hide an illegal magic shop in its basement. This results in her acquaintance with Havelock Renard, also known as the Witch King, the world’s most powerful magician. Agnes accuses him of selfishness, and he calls her sanctimonious and condescending. Despite his reputation, Agnes begins to consider that perhaps he is not a ‘dark’ magician after all. For his part, Havelock insists that he would most prefer to be left alone with his novels and magical experiments. She responds that she should at least be allowed to organize his collection of artefacts. Havelock is both allergic to cats and rather like one himself: solitary, contrary, and perhaps in need of rescue.

It turns out that the fate of the cat shelter may well be tied up with the fate of the very world. And notwithstanding Havelock’s unparalleled powers, it may be Agnes – insignificant, unmagical Agnes – who holds the key.

This was laugh-out-loud fun, deeply sweet without hitting (for my tastes) the saccharine, and moving. I will buy whatever Heather Fawcett cares to write next.

Rating: 8 opulent scarves.

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