Od Magic is an odd book. I should state first that the blurb is an absolute liar and shouldn’t be trusted as an accurate description of the book. You’d think the story was entirely about a gardner at a magic school when, in reality, he’s the most minor of around 5 POV characters. It’s not a book concerned with traditional plot structures, indulges in trope and convention, and tiptoes the line of being a modern fairy tale. I didn’t particularly care for this book, but the people who like it really like it, and I can respect that McKillip wrote something that doesn’t easily fit into a neat category or subgenre.
Read if Looking For: vibes based books, grandmas that don’t give a fuck, negligent dads and emotionally distant fiancés, soft magic
Avoid if you Dislike: two-dimensional characters, miscommunication tropes, passive protagonists, a lack of gardening in a book supposedly about gardening
Elevator Pitch:
In the city there is a school at the foot of the King’s palace. In it is a teacher who doesn’t agree with the limits the King puts on the magic they are allowed to teach. It now also holds a new gardener, brimming with untrained magic and recruited by the legendary (and largely absent) Giantess who founded the school. The castle holds a princess who likes to sneak out and isn’t sure about this ‘being engaged’ business. The city holds a quarter-warden who would rather be patrolling the streets and a magician who pretends their spells are nothing but parlor tricks. Each of their orbits connect and diverge, with the central plot (if there is one) focusing on the King’s fear of lacking control of magic and how it affects all our protagonists.
What Worked For Me:
What finally got me to pick up Od Magic, and what I probably liked the most, is how McKillip handled intertwining storylines. Specifically, the novel drew comparisons to a Shakespearian play in how it handled its POVs. The comparison is frighteningly accurate. While the various storylines do intersect, McKillip isn’t particularly interested in merging the storylines together as characters converge into a single cohesive plot, which I’ve noticed is the norm these days. Instead, Od Magic is best thought of as bumper cars. Each character pings against other characters’ storylines, but rarely do they spend more than a single chapter in contact with each other before drifting off to connect with another storyline. If anything, there’s even less of an A-Plot that Shakespeare has, though neither does Od Magic become a mosaic novel without any real connective tissue to it.
Of these storylines, I think Princess Sulys resonated the most with me. This might’ve been because she was the most active protagonist in the series, but mostly it’s because her great grandmother Ditany is a hoot. I quite enjoy when old ladies give advice (even when its bad advice), and the tea time between the two royals were consistently my favorite moments in the book.
What Didn’t Work for Me:
This story felt very tame. It was simple and straightforward. It feels like most plot points I can narrow down to simple ideas. The King fears magic far more than is healthy. The Princess doesn’t want to get married to the creepy advisor her dad picked out. The gardner just wants to fuck around with plants. The lawman is torn between duty and ethics. The frustrating part is that I feel like I could do this for most books. Anything can feel simple when you’re reductive enough about it. However, Od Magic didn’t force me to reduce much to get to these ideas. Just too close childhood fairy tales without capturing the magic of that format for me. The characters never pushed past cardboard cutouts referencing well-worn stereotypes. Perhaps if I’d read this in 2005 I’d have found the ideas within the book to be novel and genre-defying. Unfortunately, I feel like any particular plotline here has been handled far better in other books I’ve read, even if this particular mix hadn’t happened before.
Perhaps some of this was my inability to shift gears. The book certainly pitched our gardner Brenden as the main character. However, not only was this a misnomer: the book very much features an ensemble cast, but Brenden’s storyline never really goes anywhere. He’s a passenger in his own novel. I don’t really understand what he’s getting out of being here, what he wants, or how he’s anything other than a spectator in the book. We barely even get any plant magic, and the titular Od barely features in the story at all. If anything, the Princess is the star of the show; she’s certainly the connective tissue of the story and the only character who feels interested in pushing the story forward, instead of letting it happen to them.
This seems like a book where enjoying the atmosphere and vibe of the story is most of the battle. It didn’t resonate with me, which left it mostly a disappointment in my mind. For those who enjoy the prose more, I could see Od Magic being a leisurely walk in the park, lingering for the joyful sake of lingering.
Conclusion: I’m not mad that I stuck this book out, but it felt like a weird blend of originality and simplistic ideas that didn’t quite work together for me. Had it been more complex, I’d have enjoyed this a lot more.
- Characters: 3
- Setting: 3
- Craft: 3
- Themes: 2
- Enjoyment: 2
Marked for Plot 