A Darker Shade of Magic

VE Schwab comes highly recommended, and she even attended the school where I teach!

Pros: This book was fun, had some unique wrinkles and a lot of style, and I plan to read the trilogy. In today's world where Marvel and everyone else has stumbled onto the idea of a multiverse and doesn't really know what to do with it, having only 4 Londons felt like a good number to me. It kept a decently manageable scope, while also giving space for vividly different worlds to explore.

Cons: I'm not someone who's desperate for an encyclopedia describing how every magical interaction works, but one of the rules of fantasy that I think shouldn't be broken amounts to this: you can only use magic to solve a plot problem if the audience understands the limits of what that magic can do. A few places in the plot here, the magic's open-ended sense of possibility felt merely arbitrary, which robs some of the story's drama and resolutions of their proper weight and makes the magic feel more like a deus ex machina.