Magic for Liars

By: Sarah Gailey

Narrated by: Xe Sands

A Locus Awards Nominee for 2020
One of Hudson Booksellers' Best of the Year for 2019

Sharp, mainstream fantasy meets compelling thrills of investigative noir in Magic for Liars, a fantasy debut by rising star Sarah Gailey.

Ivy Gamble was born without magic and never wanted it. Ivy Gamble is perfectly happy with her life - or at least, she’s perfectly fine. She doesn't in any way wish she was like Tabitha, her estranged, gifted twin sister.

Ivy Gamble is a liar.

When a gruesome murder is discovered at the Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches theoretical magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister - without losing herself.

“An unmissable debut.” (Adrienne Celt, author of Invitation to a Bonfire)

©2019 Sarah Gailey (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

I love this book and it wrecked me.

You may think you know how this book is going to end, but you're probably wrong.

The characters in Magic For Liars are indeed mostly liars. They're flawed people, making mistakes and hurting each other for a variety of reasons. For me, that made this book so much more interesting.

I'm struggling to write more about this book without spoiling it, so I will end saying I really loved this.

Sarah Gailey knows people, and they know how to write people that seem real. Xe Sands performed this book exquisitely.

Well worth the credit

Interesting and suprising. Worth the purchase, particularly if you like a good mystery, fully fleshed out characters, and an unreliable narrator.

Murder. Mystery. Magic. Marvelous!

What an absolutely scintillating story from Sarah Gailey! Xe Sands was the perfect narrator for this book, different and understated, allowing the story to unfold seamlessly. It’s no wonder at all why this is on the Goodreads 2019 nominations for Best Books of 2019 in the Fantasy category. Murder. Mystery. Magic. Marvelous!

⚖️ Plot: This was so cleverly done, giving us glimpses into the truth and then misdirecting us almost immediately. The pace was just right allowing us to follow comfortably. And for the type of writing Gailey used, the ending was spot on!

🗺 World: As this was a magic system in our own world, there wasn’t much need to elaborate on it. But if the book were a little longer, she could‘ve gone into a little more detail on the surroundings, architecture, and how these schools of magic came to be in our society.

💑 Characters: It’s been a while since I’ve like a female character as much as I do Ivy Gamble. She’s real, she’s smart and so easy to relate to. I was very happy to see a breath of diversity and genuine air with Rahul. I really hope to see them and more books by Gailey in the future.

If teen drama was written for adults

The mystery at the heart was very well done, and the characters all felt lively without being caricatured. The family strife was palpable without overshadowing the story and the characters’ journeys, and the whole thing does such a wonderful job at showing how we all carry the scars of generational trauma, no matter how well-adjusted we may seem.

Great story, great narration

it's been a while since I finished a book in a day or two. this novel is truly compulsively listen-able. I couldn't wait to get back to it when I took a break.

Ultimately, Magic for Liars blends an intriguing, fast paced mystery--one in which the narrator has to learn a world's worth of Magical rules and systems on the sly in order to understand enough to solve a murder, which creates excellent tension-- and a moving character study that explores why we sometimes lie to ourselves, and the tension between the power of fantasy to make your life better and the cowardice in refusing (or procrastinating) facing reality as it is.

The relationships are all very believable, even if the romantic subplot veers into cliche territory. if you've read much romance, you can basically see each beat coming a mile away. but even then! The chemistry is there and enjoyable. Without spoilers, I will say that I liked the open-ended, um, ending of the subplot. it's not that unresolved romantic subplots are new, but it works here.

overall, I give this book 5/5 stars, and I definitely want to read more by this author.

Meh story

The whodunit was predictable and it struck me as needlessly a la mode to use [hot button topic omitted for spoiler reasons] as a plot device. The performance - I think she was going for conversational/naturalistic, but the variances in cadence and volume in the narration made it harder to understand.

magic from the view of the jealous

I loved it. it was a hard listen to though. You slowly listen to the main character lie to herself and lose the point of what she's doing. She falls hard and fast for every ounce of magic. And the first half she gets a lot of the info she needs but takes a while to put it together. Blinded by her jealousy and regrets she misses everything in front of her. and her lying should not have worked as much as it did.

A compelling, well-composed noir mystery, with magic for flavor

I could gush about the elegance of the mystery and themes, but I'm struggling to find anything to say that isn't a spoiler or already included in the title of this review. The bulk of the story is grounded in Ivy's personal narrative--grappling with her estrangement from her sister and her own self-loathing--which provides a nice backbone for the collision of two very different genres. The author does a good job balancing the fantastic with the mysterious: she creates a believable world, while only giving Ivy (and us) glimpses of it, never getting bogged down in cumbersome worldbuilding; and the book focuses little on the well-worn police procedural elements more standard to detective stories, leaning into its high school setting for much of the actual clue-gathering, which felt fresh and interesting to me. Imo, a good mystery is one that the audience has a chance of putting together for themselves, and this book does that very well

In short, it was a really solid story, with a satisfying ending that came back around to answer every question it brought up along the way

not a fantasy book

this is really a story about a woman estranged from her twin sister. the sister is more beautiful, smarter, more "magical". someone dies in the beginning and then it gets progressively more boring and less interesting with each chapter until the grand reveal...which was anticlimactic to say the least. magic is largely irrelevant to the story. it is used in places, but it's just decoration. I liked the narration, but the story was boring.

great narration, not very magical

this book was recommended to me. and I did enjoy it. mostly for the relationship between the two astranged sisters. the magic part was almost unnecessary. the narration was very good. she really carried the story.