Cover Image: Magic for Liars

Magic for Liars

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What do you get when you mix the styles of Agatha Christie, throwbacks to magical boarding schools à la Harry Potter, but set in California? You get Sarah Gailey's Magic For Liars, a murder mystery set in and around a magical boarding school in central California! I really enjoyed this one, and I knew I would because I enjoyed Gailey's River of Teeth novella duology released by tor.com in the last few years.

Magic For Liars weaves its way in and out of Ivy Gamble's involvement in solving a murder at the school at which her twin sister Tabitha teaches. In the process of solving the whodunnit, Ivy has to face and come to terms with her own nonmagical abilities, something she's been struggling with her entire life. She finds herself imagining the person she is to the person she could have been with magical abilities, and she has the opportunity to see who might have been had she been born with magical abilities.

Tie in this self-discovery and murder with other magical students, rumors of a chosen one, and familial relationship struggles, and Magic For Liars becomes a fully-fledged novel that has lingered with me since I finished it. I really enjoyed the fresh-noir feeling of the writing, the magic system and how gruesome and cruel magic could be, and all of the little references and throwbacks to popular mystery series and Harry Potter.

Like magic, mystery, murder, relationships between sisters, magical theories and conspiracies? Read this delight of a novel. It's out June 4.

Many thanks to Tor for a complimentary review copy! All opinions are my own.

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Ivy Gamble has always wanted magic. The real magic. The magic her sister has. Instead of going to a magical high school and practicing spells and charms, she barely graduated normal high school. After her mother’s death, Ivy’s dream of joining the FBI disappeared, just like her relationship with her sister. After years of barely speaking, the sisters are thrown together when Ivy is hired to investigate a murder at Osthorne Academy, a school for magical children and where Ivy’s sister Tabitha, teaches.
Now, faced with a brutal murder, hormonal teenagers, a prophecy, and a new love interest, Ivy struggles to pick out the truths from the sea of lies and deception created by everyone involved.
This was a very twisty and turny mystery that kept me guessing all the way to the last page. Everyone had a secret to hide and some secrets were far more deadly than others. Ivy has her own big secret to keep-she lets everyone assume that she has magic and knows what they’re talking about. But Ivy doesn’t have a clue and this puts at her a significant disadvantage, especially when she catches the eye of a teacher and uses his interest in her to gain more information about the case. Ivy also spends a great deal of time lying to herself-about her own abilities, her own strengths, and her ability to consume bottles and bottles of booze.
Teenagers struggling to find their identity, young love, and emergency contraception played a huge role in this book and I felt it was handled really well. I really appreciated how the author wrote about abortions and how the school nurse was able to administer a magical abortion before a certain time frame and then referred the young women to medical doctors after that time had passed. This wasn’t done to make things more difficult for the young women, it was done to keep them safe and healthy. Amazing how writing about responsible health care feels so progressive.
This was a great magical mystery and I really enjoyed it. I really like fantasy that mixes with our own reality-the fact that magic is real but we don’t discuss with people who aren’t magical. Magic for Liars has the perfect blend of fantasy, mystery, and teenage drama to keep your interest from start to finish.
Full Disclosure Time: I received a free digital copy of this book from Netgalley. Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. All opinions are my own.

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Ivy Gamble is a decidedly unmagical private investigator. No frills. No entanglements. Her mother died of cancer, her father checked out emotionally, and her relationship with her twin sister Tabitha is estranged, at best. Tabitha, though, isn't going the Jessica Jones route. Tabitha is magical. She got to go away to study at magical boarding school, and now she's a teacher at one of those schools. She's got the life Ivy always wanted.

But things aren't perfect at Osthorne, and after an unsatisfying external investigation, Ivy's brought in to solve a nasty murder. Complicating things are the hot teacher who doesn't know Ivy's not magic, and...Tabitha, who has more secrets than Ivy suspected.

This is a decided departure for Gailey, whose previous books have involved alternate histories of America, in which domesticated hippoes were a Thing. Those books were great fun, and so is this one. Boarding school murder books are one genre, and magical boarding schools are another, but Gailey mashes them up with glee. HIghly enjoyable.

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Magic for Liars is a non-fantasy murder mystery, set in a magical world. The protagonist, Ivy Gamble, is an ordinary PI hired to solve a murder at a very unordinary (read: magical) academy - an academy at which her estranged twin sister, Tabitha, teaches, no less. (It's more Brakebills than Hogwarts, if you were wondering.) Since Ivy has never been magical, as she starts to encounter more and more magic during the course of her investigation, it remains as illusory and mysterious to her as ever. And, because it's written in first person, the magic system is completely alien to us - this is not a Sanderson novel. It's a very non-magical detective story (no revelio charms), wrapped in a fantastical book jacket (even the school graffiti is magic), and that juxtaposition made things very interesting for me, even if it was very frustrating for Ivy. Overall, I quite enjoyed it. The characterization was strongest for Ivy and Tabitha, obviously, but still solid for everyone else. The plot/mystery itself was, well, mysterious, with a twist I didn't see coming. The pacing was good, even if the third act felt a little rushed. If you like mysteries and/or fantasy, I'd definitely recommend it.

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Magic for Liars is an intriguing read with a great balance of action and characterization. The plot line is delightfully twisty. The characters are cleverly designed to move the plot forward -- and yet they are still figures that, in most cases, evoke the reader's empathy and caring.

In a world where magic makes the impossible a fact of life, death can come from the most apparently benign sources. An entertaining, engaging read

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First i would like to mention the cover, its gorgeous. It really stands out.
The reason i wanted to read this book was its title. When i see Magic im intrigued. Unfortunately this book was not my book. Altough very well written the story could not catch me. I wanted to like the story so much, because all the ingredients are there; private eye, murder and mystery meets at hogwarts. Yet it did not drag me into it. I do like female private detectives with some imperfections and flaws but every now and then i felt she did a little too much whining and a little too much self pitty. Besides of what i did not like about Ivy, I think the rest of the story and especially the magic was very entertaining. No big surprises but very entertaining.

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Thank you NetGalley for the digital ARC of this book.

I found this to be a fast-paced read, complete with magic, murder, and mysteries. The MC has her fair share of issues and makes her journey a bit messy, but for some reason I found myself attracted to her storyline. While the story has some definite plot holes, I think it was a great debut, written really well.

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Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey’s debut novel, is one of my favorites of 2019. It stars Ivy Gamble, a down-on-her-luck private investigator. The head of the boarding school her estranged twin sister works at shows up one day and asks Ivy to investigate a death at the school. The police dismissed the death, but the head thinks there’s more to it. This will be a bigger job than Ivy's ever had, the kind she dreams of getting, both in responsibility, a death, (rather than bored 40 year olds having affairs) and in terms of payment, which she desperately needs.

The death aside, there’s reason to be reluctant. The school, the Osthorne Academy for Young Mages, is for students who can do magic. Some people got it, some people don’t—and the PI doesn’t, but her sister does.

After getting two chapters in, I rolled over and told my wife that I was reading a new book that seemed like it was written just for me.

If you’d like to read something that’s a little bit Veronica Mars, a little bit The Magicians, I’d highly recommend Magic for Liars. I greatly enjoyed it. There are a few twists and turns I won’t get into, but as they happened, I FOLLOWED THEM ALL. This doesn’t mean I predicted everything (or even most things), but often when I read books like this, at some point I end up just giving up and going along for the ride knowing that whatever I’ve missed be recapped before the final denouement. Here, I was able to keep up the whole time. Nice work, Sarah Gailey!

I received this book at no cost from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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The expectations I had for the book may have led to the 4 stars instead of 5 stars. While it is a murder mystery...the majority of the fiction is dedicated to non-magical and P.I Ivy's past, and the state of her traumatic and complex relationship with her magical twin sister. Estranged from her at a young age, taking this case dredges up unresolved feelings beneath the issues that inform Ivy's life.

Fitting within the P.I mold, Ivy has some... bad habits, particularly alcohol as a coping mechanism. I liked that this trope actually had some heavy bearing on the majority of the fiction. Sometimes it's just a given that a P.I has these coping mechanisms and it's sort of handwaved. Ivy dredges up her own past in a peripheral way when she takes the case at the same magical school her estranged sister goes to. Both never truly dealt with some seriously heavy issues in high school, and they start to reconnect as the investigation proceeds.

There is an unreliable narrator aspect of the story that does a bit too much hand waving for my tastes, though. Ivy doesn't have a very professional approach to the case, in that she inserts herself into some of the people's lives in a way that completely compromises her investigation. It's a trade-off. There's a lot of interesting drama and the writer is fantastic at expressing Ivy's inner thoughts and feelings--and tying them to the unfolding narrative.

My quibbles are small. There was a satisfying ending, it's well written and interesting. But I'm a sucker for magic systems and the title sort of implies there's going to be one? Instead, it's essentially just if you're magic, you "get it"; if you're not magical--you just will not get it. It was very unsatisfying. This, along with the unreliable narrator aspects that hand waves a bit too much, downgraded my rating.

Ultimately I really liked the overall tone that was coupled with a believable sense of honesty that comes with the unreliable narrator aspects. It's very heavy and quite sad. I liked that the expected catharsis that comes along with these types of stories was elegant and, again, quite honest. It's a messy ending and I really liked that about it.

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Thank you very much for the Advance Reader Copy of "Magic for Liars" by Sarah Gailey. I did enjoy parts of the book, and I did finish, but this was not the perfect book for me. I do like private detective books with some self loathing, but felt that IVY was a little too self defeating. Also I got kind of bogged down towards the middle for some reason. I do feel that this will be a good book for many readers, particularly women, hopefully that does not come off as mansplaining and or sexism. There were many female characters and I do not have as much insight as a female reader may have. I do follow Ms. Gailey on Twitter, and have a great deal of respect for her and her work.Again, Thank you, and happy reading.

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Magic for Liars is Sarah Gailey’s answer to detective noir, murder mysteries, and magical schools, and from the moment I heard of it, it’s been one of my most anticipated books of the year. In anticipation, I’ve spent this year reading all of Gailey’s work that I could get my hands on and, much like their short fiction and novellas, Magic for Liars is cleverly written, darkly humorous, brilliantly insightful, and impossible to put down.

Gailey casts their own spell with the premise alone: private investigator Ivy Gamble gets asked to solve a gruesome murder at Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged and magically gifted twin sister Tabitha teaches. From the moment Ivy takes the case, the story spirals into a character-driven exploration of nuanced sibling relationships, the pressures and expectations of magic, realistic high school drama, and how to heal from and process the difficulties, choices, and traumas of life—magical or otherwise. The narrative carried a heartbreaking emotional weight that I wasn’t always prepared for and yet, at the same time, this was the most fun I’ve had reading a novel this year.

This book takes an obscene amount of my interests and manages to combine them into a beautiful, coherent narrative that feels like it shouldn’t work—but it does. I left this book longing to return to the magic and secrets of Osthorne, despite everything I’d seen, and I’m confident that any reader who picks this up will find something to love about it. I’m already eagerly awaiting whatever Gailey decides to write next and when Magic for Liars releases in June, I’ll already be shoving it into the hands of everyone I know.

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2.5 disappointment-laden stars.

I wanted to like this SO much. I loved the American Hippo books. The concept for this was exceptional. And it was touted as being a cross between The Magicians and Tana French.

Unfortunately, the book failed to live up to the premise it set up. While it simmered with potential almost right up to the end, the story often felt flat, the plot had a lot of threads that never quite knit together properly, and worst of all, the "solve" was a complete cop-out (and an overused one) that feels cowardly every time a mystery writer uses it to explain a murder.

Also, the whole book is just utterly depressing.

I can see the Tana French comparison to an extent, but this book has zero in common with The Magicians, so look elsewhere if you're seeking your next Brakebills-like fix.

Gailey writes well and she had a GREAT idea for this story, but the execution was such a disappointment.

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Sarah Gailey is an absolute delight. Her writing style is fun, fresh, and it looks effortless. I was excited to read Magic for Liars and I can't wait to see what she does next!

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Magic for Liars was so great, I really enjoyed this book. Ivy Gamble is a PI who has no magical abilities, unlike her estranged twin Tabitha. When there's a murder at the (magic) school Tabitha teaches at, Ivy is hired to investigate, and she has to confront her feelings of inadequacy and grief over the way her life has gone. I liked Ivy - she's really relatable - and both the mystery and the setting are nicely developed. Mrs Webb, the school secretary, in particular, is fascinating, and I liked the way the students and teachers try to manipulate Ivy. It can be hard for her to tell what's magic and what isn't. I did wish for a little more from the book - it would have been nice to get a little better feel for the victim, and I thought that the murderer was fairly obvious about three quarters through the book and the ending felt a little rushed. That being said, this was a great read and I highly recommend it.

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A murder in a school for witches. To get the murderer, they need someone from the outside. Someone who is not one of them. Ivy Gamble, P.I., will solve this case.

Ivy is happy with her life, until she gets a visit from the headmistress of the Osthorne Academy for young Mages. One of their teachers, Sylvia Capley, was found death in the academy library and she does not believe the report the NMIS – National Mage Investigative Service – gave her, that it was just a magic accident.

Now, Ivy is going to a place she swore she would never set a foot in and she has to face her sister Tabitha, who is a teacher at the Academy. If taking on a murder case, which she usually does not do, talking to her sister seems to be harder than working on a case she did not ask for.

Sarah Gailey’s magic crime book is a mix of Blood Ties meets Veronica Mars with a bit of Harry Potter sprinkled in throughout the page. Be aware that it may sound obvious in which direction the story might go, but trust me, you will get it wrong a few times. Another similarity is that there is a chosen one who will be the most powerful mag of our time. This person is revealed pretty early on within the story and does turn out to be an important clue to the story. However, it does kind of feel misplaced with everything else going on.

The most interesting part in the story is the fact that mags are capable of doing some really cool things, even curing people. However, this is only possible until a certain point when everything goes sideways. This is something that is usually not a topic in a magic story, or it is said that it just is not possible. But here, it is and this is what makes Magic for Liars special. 

How far would you go to heal a person? How much are you willing to risk?

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Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan/Tor-Forge for this arc.

I wish I enjoyed this read more than I did. It sounded like it would be right up my alley. But it just missed out for me. I was so irritated with Ivy's self pity through out the book, that I was tempted to give up by 37%. I found it to be a slow read as it lacked the tension I usually find in murder mysteries and I had a tough time connecting to any of the characters. There was plenty of teenage angst and drama (as expected for a story set in a high school), but the "magic" didn't really sparkle for me.

2.5 stars rounded up.

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I really enjoyed this book, and would definitely recommend it for older high school students who are looking to graduate into more adult speculative fiction. The cast of characters was intriguing because it spanned magic and non-magic people, adults and teens, public school grads and private school students. I think students would respond well to the dynamics between all of these characters, as well as the underlying mystery that pulls the story along. Parts of it read like a hard-boiled detective novel which was a really fun, refreshing change.

The realism embedded in this story about a magic school is very compelling and is something that I think students and adults alike will really respond positively to. It's Hogwarts modernized, plunked down into a modern setting with more grit and grimness. It might be a little much for younger high school students, but I think mature 11th and 12th graders would really enjoy the suspense, the conflicts between characters, and the main character in particular, who has lived on the edges of the magic world and her relationship with her sister and who is trying to navigate both as she solves a mystery.

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I liked this one so much more than I thought I would!

I'm typically not a noir (or murder) fan, but the magic element got me a little intrigued, so I decided to give it a try. Got pleasantly transported to a magical high school, with some fun twists and turns and some really wonderful weirdness.

The magic in this story is subdued, focusing more on the mystery and relationships, but the magic that was present was weirdrously imaginative. Gailey's got a funky, descriptive angle on the magical realm and hey girl honestly if you're reading this can we just grab coffee and hang out because anybody who can create this world seems super rad, y'know?

Also, the strained sister relationship - god, I'm a sucker for this. I have a sister and I love her and I always wish we were closer and I'm always happy when we connect, and those moments feel too rare and spark a yearning ache in the center of my chest when they happen and this book captured that complicated sister relationship perfectly.

My one complaint was the alcoholic angle of Ivy's character - it was weakly done and felt unnecessary. There's a writing tip that says something along the lines of 'if you can take it out of your story and it doesn't change anything, it doesn't need to be there,' and you could take the alcoholism out of the story and it honestly wouldn't change a thing and would be improved for it in my opinion. It felt like the author skimmed the wikipedia page on alcoholism and just threw in some bottles of wine because a noir PI is generically an alcoholic. It felt forced and unnecessary.

HOWEVER. It was a small part of the book, and I loved everything else. Also I really love Miss Gamble? Like can we get a full novel of just her? Maybe in her healing years? I would read this so fast.

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This book was more than I expected it to be. I found it difficult to put down once I got about halfway through it. Ivy's struggle with her relationships, both with her sister and her love interests felt very real. I enjoyed the detective story and the uncovering of secrets.

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"Magic for Liars" is Pretty Little Liars meets the Magicians meets whoever your favorite noir antihero is. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, it probably isn't. The protagonist, Ivy, is a non-magical PI with alcoholism, insecurity issues, and a magical twin sister who teaches at a Not-Hogwarts; the two are estranged, but Ivy wishes for a reconciliation. In fact, she wishes for more than that: she longs to belong to the world of the endless wonder of magic, especially once she gets a job investigating a murder of another teacher at her sister's school. It's a refreshing approach, telling a story about a magical school through an outsider's perspective; there are the Chosen Ones' disputes in the periphery, incomprehensible magical terminology thrown around, which Ivy just does her best to pretend to understand, etc, etc. Gailey masterfully plays with tropes and cliches for both the urban fantasy and noir genre, and the result is quite entertaining. It's not hard to figure out who the culprit is ahead of the big reveal (not that it ruins anything if you do) and the fantasy/worldbuilding aspect isn't at all comprehensive, but it's a fun read!

Thank you, NetGalley, for the e-ARC!

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