Here’s a graceful, lyrical first-in-series novel about shapeshifters in New York of long-ago from the fantasy author who brought us A College of Magics, River Rats, and the fabulous Sorcery and Cecilia series. The first part of Caroline Stevermer’s The Glass Magician, a straight-up mystery about a young stage magician whose mentor is accused of committing a spectacular murder via a vaudeville magic trick, is full of delicious detail about old-time vaud prestidigitators and their professional gimmicks, and also about New York a century ago. Then the story takes a left turn into the society of shape-shifters. The heroine finds herself embattled in her own right, not by her mentor’s enemies, the law and the real murderer, but by the strange hierarchy of shifters, half-successful shifters, and ordinary people. She is also being hunted by a manticore, a predator that feeds on adolescent shifters.
I suppose I could go all NYRB on this, but I’d rather just wallow in the vaudeville, and especially in the behind-the-scenes stuff about how magic tricks are built, bought, used, and claimed almost as a trademark by specific performers. And of course, how they’re used as melodramatic murder weapons. I wallowed in the “trading” (shape-shifting) by the heroine, who can, if she puts her mind to it, become a swan…but, oy, the angst she has to go through to get there! There’s a Regency feel to the “high life among the traders” bits. The class society of old New York gets additional class stuff overlaid on it, because the traders outrank ordinary folks, and among traders there are ranks, as well. Yet Stevermer takes notice of the ordinary folk. That matters to me.
The chocolate sprinkles on top? There’s more than half a promise of romance heating up between the heroine and her best friend’s broody trader aristo brother … or will it be the dark-skinned commoner who slays manticores for a living and keeps saving her life?
(Tom Doherty Associates, 2020)
