In the second book of the Wild Magic trilogy, courageous young Mup and her family are trying to heal and restore the kingdom when they uncover an ancient and powerful anger. The old queen and her raggedy witches have fled Witches Borough, and Mup’s family has moved into the cold, newly empty castle. But the queen’s legacy lingers in the fear and mistrust of her former subjects and in the memories … in the memories that live in the castle’s very walls. While Mup’s mam tries to restore balance to a formerly oppressed world, Mup herself tries to settle into her strange new home with her dad, Tipper, and Crow. When an enchanted snow blankets the castle, Mup’s family is cut off from the rest of the kingdom, and the painful memories of the old queen’s victims begin to take form, thanks to a ghost whose power may be too much for even Mup and Mam to handle. Celine Kiernan weaves a timely and essential truth into the second book of her trilogy: that dismantling oppression means honoring the pains of the past, and perhaps the most potent magic of all is encouraging joy and hope wherever possible.
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I received a gratis copy of this book through NetGalley.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first tale in this middle grade fantasy series, Begone the Raggedy Witches. It introduced Mup, an intelligent, compassionate girl whose father is kidnapped–by her maternal grandmother, a witch and cruel despot who is trying to lure Mup’s mother back home. I don’t think it’s too much a spoiler to say the family survived, and is now trying to settle into their new magical home. This is where The Little Grey Girl begins, and to my surprise, I enjoyed it even more than the first book.
The first book spent a great deal of time exploring the dark, quirky realm and its citizens. The Little Grey Girl is about the long-term consequences of a dictatorship. That sounds like a heady theme for a middle grade book, and it is–and the novels handles it with impressive grace. Mup’s mum doesn’t want to rule or be anything like her mother, but the people in this magical realm don’t understand the concept of democracy. They want strong leadership. And as much as they suffered under the grandmother’s rule, there is comfort in familiarity. They lived under strict rules about magic for many decades: only the raggedy witches were allowed to become elite and explore their full powers, while regular folks could shapeshift–but only into specific creatures. If they didn’t, well. They suffered. They died.
This is where the book truly awed me. Mup encounters the little grey girl and quickly realizes she must be a ghost, but the reason she’s a ghost–and why she’s doing what she is–emerges with a perfect pace. Again, the book delves into heady stuff: death, suffering, and erasure–being oblivious to or forgetting the horrors people have endured. All of this is handled with respect and grace.
Of course, the book isn’t all serious. Mup is full of brightness. Her voice shines. Her baby brother still insists on being in dog form much of the time. Her parents are wonderful, loving people; this book never brought up the interracial nature of the family, but I still love how the first book casually mentioned that Mup’s father is Irish and his parents came from Nigeria.
Truly, this series handled so many things in a lovely way, even as it’s a fantastic fantasy adventure. I sure would have loved these books as a kid, and I’m glad I get to enjoy them as a grown-up, too!
The middle book in a Middle Grade Fiction trilogy can be a funny thing. Sometimes they are simply there to fill the space between the beginning and the end…and sometimes they make an impact of their own that’s SO great, SO powerful, and SO mesmerizing, you never see it coming. I’m happy to report that THIS particular “book two” falls into the latter category. While I was enchanted by the first in The Wild Magic trilogy, this second release was nothing to shy away from…in fact, it reminds us very much to not shy away from those things we’d rather forget, to embrace the past for what it was, and move forward with the lessons learned through those trials and tribulations. Despite the absence of their presence in our reading lives since book one’s release (not truly THAT long ago), the wild magic is recaptured with Mup, Crow and a new friend (or not?) or two along the way. Go in with a stalwart heart though…you’re gonna need every beat to defeat the shadows within!
**ARC received for review; opinions are my own