A whimsical romp combining familiar tropes with inventive charm.
Tropes are not rules, and they are not poison. They are tools, shortcuts to simplify some elements of plot construction by using familiar component parts. They are pieces of mating plumage, which signal to the reader that the author is engaging with a particular set of expectations. Maiga Doocy has a deft hand at deploying tropes to advantage in Sorcery and Small Magics, so that the story felt comfortable without being stale, full of familiar bits of structure that guided my expectations along familiar paths, while allowing me to be surprised by inventive bits of character or world-building that filled out the details.
We open with a Magic School™ setting, in which Leovander Lovage and Sebastian Grimm are Rivals™, nearly Enemies™, who have been snarking at each other their entire time at school. In full fairness, this is on Leo, because Leo is kind of a jerk who can’t resist picking on straight-laced and reserved Grimm; and indeed his juvenile shenanigans have put him on the edge of expulsion if he doesn't shape up. Now they are in their last year of studies, preparing for the Trials™ which will determine their magical futures. Leo, with an aristocratic and respected magical lineage, is skilled at small magics (charms and cantrips), but useless at Grandmagic, as larger spells are called. They always go wrong, someone gets hurt, and so he’s sworn off them, which means his career options are limited. Nevertheless, he’s rich and privileged, so that’s not really going to be a real problem for him. Meanwhile, Grimm is serious, highly skilled, and fully invested in making a name for himself – which is important, since he comes from a much less privileged background.
Through a reasonably plausible but also entertainingly contrived accident, Grimm inadvertently casts a spell on Leo that renders Leo subject to every one of his commands. Whatever he orders, Leo must obey, and if Grimm gets too far away, Leo suffers increasingly agonising discomfort that becomes life-threatening. Such spells are highly, highly illegal, so rather than go ask for help, our boys decide to keep it secret while trying to work out how to undo this curse on their own.
This premise could absolutely be a paint-by-numbers enemies-to-lovers forced-proximity magic-school romantasy. But because Doocy uses the tropes as tools, rather than crutches, instead it’s something a bit more inventive. For example, the Quest™ to undo the spell takes Leo and Grimm out of school, so really only the opening scenes make use of the familiar Magic School trappings. Further, every element of the world-building is constructed to reinforce their character arcs, which lends a really pleasing coherence to the story. This is most obvious in the magic system. In this world, magic requires two types of people to cooperate in order to cast a spell: scrivers, who write the spells, and casters, who actually cast them. Leo is a scriver, and Grimm is a caster, so in addition to the Forced Proximity™ of the curse, their complementary skills also add a structural component of Working Together™.
This magic system is itself deeply intertwined with the best bit of the setting: the Unquiet Wood, a wild forest whose dangers are walled off from the domain of humans by a boundary that is constantly refreshed by governmental magician teams. But the boundary is not perfect, and when magical influences slip through, the results can be deadly: blights that destroy crops and ruin whole towns, poisonous flowers that will kill a person in hours. Yet the magic can also be wondrous, and a whole economy of Unquiet Wood foragers makes its living by venturing past the boundary and collecting magical artifacts. A single wing feather of a griffin can be a vitally important magical tool in spell casting.
So naturally – naturally – Leo and Grimm find that the only path to undoing their curse takes them into the Unquiet Wood, where various eventualities cast light upon their magical capacity, their relationship, and the true nature of the Unquiet Wood.
One thing I quite liked about this book was the absence of any real antagonist. Leo and Grimm get into their current situation through a genuinely innocent misunderstanding, and the solution that they seek is accomplished by acting in good faith with everyone they meet. Sometimes they are collaboratively working together to solve mutual problems, but sometimes people just help out out for the sake of helping. The baseline assumption of this book is that most people are Good, Actually. It's not quite the same as Cozy Fantasy, which tends to focus more on importing rituals of self-care into fantasy land (coffee, baking, books, cushions, cats, hygge, etc.), but it's still a comfortable worldview to spend a few hundred pages with.
And it's worth noting that this theme — that people are Good and Cooperative, Actually — serves as a structural glue to many elements of the plot and setting. It underlies the duality of the magic system; it shows up in the actions Leo and Grimm take, and the bargains they strike with other people they meet during their quest; and I would bet folding cash that it will also turn out to be the solution to the current deadliness of the Unquiet Wood. This world is built on combining unlike things to build something larger, not walling them off from each other. So despite the crossbow bolts that start flying in the climax, no one is really operating out of malice here. It’s a kind book, peopled with basically good folks — yes, even the ones that need to get fed to monsters have Reasons. It is entertainingly written, tightly plotted, and not (quite) as predictable as you’d expect from its component parts. I expect to read the next books in the series with great pleasure.
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Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws
Highlights:
- Slow-burn stormcloud/sunshine order/chaos romance
- Whimsical, charming setting and magic
- Effectively deployed tropes
Reference: Doocy, Maiga, Sorcery and Small Magics [Orbit 2024].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
