On the surface, Amy (Amelia) is like every other sixteen-year-olds – albeit with ADHD – yet in a rather short period of time, she finds out that she’s a Witch and also that maybe she’s attracted to other girls. Or at least to one other girl, Natalie, who is part-Witch part-Vampire. And maybe another, Willow, who’s half-Elf. No wonder she’s confused. Then there’s the matter of the curse which put her mother to sleep and no one seems to know how to wake her.
I loved the atmosphere of this book. Since Harry Potter, there’s been a lot of YA books with witches and wizards at school and I often get an impression of déjà-vu, but not here, at least not in a way that bothered me. What I did feel was the intensity, the earnestness and sometimes the ingenuousness of adolescence.
Basics of Spellcraft is my first book by this author. It’s set in her Snowverse, which boasts I don’t know how many books. What that means is that while this particular novel is the first of a new series with a completely open ending (yes, there’s a cliffhanger), there are quite a few others in the same universe, some of which you can get for free on L. C. Mawson’s website. And I’ll definitely check them out.
Because the whole magic thing is new to Amelia, the reader learns all about it with her, which I think makes this book a good one to get into the Snowverse if, like me, you’re only just discovering it. Book two, History of Magic, is available for pre-order already, so if open endings are a problem for you, you’ll need to be patient but not for too long.
Jude in the Stars 