Colleen Mondor Reviews Remedial Magic by Melissa Marr

Remedial Magic, Melissa Marr (Bramble 978-1-250-88413-8, $17.99, tp, 336 pp) February 2024.

Melissa Marr’s Remedial Magic, first in a series, is a romance novel involving multiple characters engaged in tricky relationships. Ellie is a librarian in a small town who lives with her aunt and en­gages in the rather unusual self-described hobby of researching missing persons cases. These are not people who are murdered by spouses or involved in criminal activity, but rather the ones who are there one moment and, with no explanation, gone the next. Years earlier her Aunt Hestia vanished only to return later, with no memory of her miss­ing years, after Ellie’s parents were killed in an accident. Her fixation with other missing people comes from the uncertainty presented by the gap in Hestia’s history. An unexpected result of reading about so many people who vanished is that Ellie is determined to be as dull as possible, a person who is so boring they don’t have a reason to disap­pear. As the novel opens, unremarkable Ellie has a remarkable encounter with a stunning woman named Prospero who appears in her library, kisses her dramatically, and then leaves. Ellie is smitten; she has no idea that Prospero is pretty much on a mission to destroy her life.

The path of true love can be a bit messy, can’t it?

Aside from Ellie (who ends up being decidedly remarkable), there is Maggie, who is trying to figure out how to keep her teenage son away from his dangerous father when the two are in a sudden car accident and she wakes up in a new world and can’t find her son anywhere. She meets Sondre, who tells her she is now in the town of Crenshaw; she is a witch, and she must attend classes at the College of Remedial Magic, where she will learn to use her powers. Her son, who is not a witch, is back home in North Carolina, and everything is just fine, don’t worry. I’ll leave you to imagine how things go with Maggie and the mysterious Sondre, but needless to say while she really misses her son and wants to find him, she also finds Sondre pretty darn irresistible sooooo….

Then there is poor Dan, who is dying and goes on a last-ditch hike, falls, and wakes up in, you guessed it, Crenshaw! He receives a speech similar to Maggie’s, and together they soon meet Norwe­gian rockstar Axell, another new witch who really connects with Dan and soon enough, as they plot to have a few romantic encounters, they learn a lot more about Crenshaw than any of the new witches are supposed to.

Ellie ends up in Crenshaw because Prospero cannot forget that kiss, and there is a prophecy, and Crenshaw has serious magic-related problems, and all of this sounds like it could be fun except, remember Maggie’s son? And what about Aunt Hestia? And why is Crenshaw poisoned, and how come the rules are so strict about leaving and maybe some of this is, as Maggie yells at one point, a lot more like kidnapping than having an adventure. That’s where Remedial Magic gets a bit uglier than it intends, perhaps, because no matter how pretty the town and how fun the magic, there is still Maggie’s son back home with a dangerous father, and at some point forcing her to give him up becomes decidedly unromantic.

Marr walks a fine line with Remedial Magic. She wants the relationships to be spicy and ex­citing, all the things that sudden romance can provide, but the denizens of Crenshaw have been practicing some truly awful magic for a long time to keep themselves safe and hidden, and Prospero especially has a lot of secrets that are not going to be welcome to Ellie (or anyone else). There are many moral questions to consider in this novel of new love (or at least lust) and new magic, and the author doesn’t hesitate to expose them. There’s an unexpected darkness to Remedial Magic, and it will be interesting to see where the dramatic end­ing (get ready for it) takes readers next.

This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.

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