If A Sleight of Shadows is what happens when authors focus on writing comics for a while, then more authors should write comics. Kat Howard, already a highly accomplished novelist and short story writer, has also spent many years co-creating the Books of Magic series, and the concision required of comics writers—the efficiency of dialogue and scene—is wonderfully evident in this second entry into the Unseen World books.
When we last left our heroes, the world of magicians was in disarray. The elite Unseen World had been upended during the events of An Unkindness of Magicians, during which protagonist Sydney gave up her magic in order to destroy the system by which magic had been functioning. To be clear, she did not destroy magic itself—although she herself was shorn of her abilities. Instead she broke the House of Shadows, a literal house standing in for a figurative edifice in which, Omelas-like, a miserable few were bled of their magic by torture in order to allow the many to practice magic with ease.
Sydney was one of those abused few, and she had both her revenge and her justice. But she also paid a terrible price, losing her magic and gaining instead a heaping of new trauma on top of the old. Now, a year afterward, the grief lingers and the rage still simmers. She has new friends and allies—Laurent, a new head of House with a bold vision of inclusivity; Verenice, a fellow survivor of Shadows; and Grace Valentine, new head of the Unseen World—but new enemies, too. Including the House of Shadows, which refuses to stay dead.
This feels very much like a book that could only be written post-2020 in America. It’s full of reckoning, sure, but so was the first book, An Unkindness of Magicians. The additional years have given this book an added note of bitter resignation, the clear-eyed and lead-hearted conviction that even when you reveal the awful cruelties of a system, so very many people will just … not care. Whether by rationalization or self-interest, they will value their comfort above the suffering and death of others. They will do nothing, or worse, they will fight to return to the old ways.
This may not have been surprising in 2017, a few years after An Unkindness of Magicians was published, but it might have seemed perhaps a bit excessive. Not now. Now it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that, just because two privileged white women can’t get their drinks for free, they’ll destroy lives and reinstate a system of outright slavery. If anything, it might not be exaggerated enough.
That scene with Dahlia and Catriona having a leisurely midmorning chat is fairly perfect as scenes go, though. It’s vicious without ever resorting to in-text sarcasm; the entire scene is so drenched in critique that it need say nothing else. One woman in her expensive athleisure, the other in her chic neutrals, at midmorning on the Upper West Side when many people have to be at work. One wants a green smoothie, the other a green tea, but they can no longer simply have the beverages appear. They must pay a cost, and while this price is measured in pain instead of money, they are still disproportionally outraged. And, to top it all off, the tea is cold. Well, that’s clearly the last straw! Torture is now warranted, so long as it’s the torture of others.
Yeah, that checks out.
Howard manages to avoid A Sleight of Shadows feeling didactic by never lecturing the reader. The scenes and character arcs make clear her stance on various issues, but she never stoops to hectoring. In part that’s because she has no time for it. A Sleight of Shadows is a sleek, honed blade, with prose and character work that cuts to the quick. It’s urgent without feeling rushed, in large part because there are no extraneous paragraphs or scenes: everything proceeds in precise order.
Which isn’t to say there is no room for fun. I really appreciated the Lara Merlin sections, in which she deals with her newly-restored House throwing tantrums. The mean-spirited—if largely innocuous—pranks give a lot of character not just to House Merlin, but to all the Houses by extension. They provide a welcome counterpoint to the actively malevolent House of Shadows, and context for the unsettling ambivalence of Unseen archives. I also enjoyed the new characters, specifically Mia, whose enthusiasm for magic imparts a sense of wonder too often lacking from modern fantasy. Being able to do magic is really cool. Kudos to Howard for lingering over the pleasures of astonishment and achievement.
Mia’s entry into the Unseen world is, however, a little thin on realism. While I can certainly identify with wanting magic to be real, and with being pretty naïve as a kid, a single email—even a magically enhanced one—would not be enough to snuff out a certain amount of self-protective skepticism. In this and a few other instances, Howard’s tendency toward the archetypal over the actual shows up, which isn’t necessarily bad, but does bear mentioning. A Sleight of Shadows isn’t ultimately about New York or the rules of magic systems or even about the characters, although they’re well-drawn and Sydney remains an excellent protagonist. It’s a book meant to carry metaphors for power: how we get it, how we keep it, and how we atone for what we’ve done with it—even when we do what we think is right.
One of the most nuanced portraits of power is Verenice, the first escapee of the House of Shadows. She has been struggling with the implications of her escape and how much survivor’s guilt she still carries. Why didn’t she think to take others with her? Why didn’t she do more to tear down the system once she was out?
A modern knee-jerk reaction to her inner conflict does, I think, contain some value: we want to say that Verenice is a victim and a survivor, and she deserves to know that escaping was enough. Living needs no justification and deserves no guilt. She has given so much; giving up her shadow to replace Sydney’s is agonizingly unnecessary. And that’s all true, but no matter whether or to what extent the guilt is “deserved,” the feeling is still there. It persists as much as the House of Shadows itself, rebuilding itself despite conscious effort to tear it down. Therapy is wonderful, but sometimes the rhetoric of self-love and self-forgiveness is not enough. Verenice needs to do something. She needs to make it right according to her own sense of right and wrong, or risk devaluing that sense entirely.
Verenice’s sacrifice is a sorrowful one, but replete with the dignity of choice. The slow, deliberate reality of this choice to sacrifice part of herself, which she makes over and over again, drives home the difference between her efficacy and Ian’s failure. Ian, scion of a powerful House and privileged with wealth and magic since birth, believed that doing nothing was a way to help. When finally disabused of this notion, he made a solitary, guilt-ridden attempt to fix everything all at once—and failed, of course, because people don’t tear down systems. Coalitions do. Verenice’s alliance with Sydney, and Sydney’s network of support, make resistance against the House of Shadows possible.
The novel’s conclusion is a little underwhelming if you read it for straight narrative. Through various machinations, Sydney is forced to do battle with the House of Shadows by proxy once again, and the proxy this time is an innocent duped into doing battle for the wrong side. It’s a compelling setup, but the solution to the thorny magical and moral conflict comes out of nowhere, a deus ex machina so convenient that the epilogue chapter seems less like falling action and more like Howard cramming in some last-minute consequences as an apology. While I don’t love how easily it resolves, it’s clear that the book isn’t about the mechanics of magic: A Sleight of Shadows isn’t setting up logical problems; it’s working with philosophical ones.
Philosophically speaking, then, the novel’s question is how to extricate yourself from a system that pits the disadvantaged against each other in order to further privilege the already powerful. Howard is smart to point out that the dichotomy advanced by the privileged class—here represented by Dahlia—is a false one: there are more choices than one side destroying the other or martyring itself for principle.
Yet the message remains clear: someone is going to have to lose something. The whole issue of sacrifice runs powerfully through the book, and Howard is right not to let Sydney keep putting herself on the line. There is only so much we can ask of individuals, especially those who have already had so much taken from them. Instead, the loss is shared out among all the players, even the unfortunate dupe, Mia. It’s less that Mia in any way “deserves” to be punished for being too trusting (she doesn’t), and more that she is standing in for an entire generation inheriting the bad faith deals that older magicians made. And yes, it’s unfair. Life is unfair—a truism that Howard knows we need to accept as the present state of affairs before we can get to fixing the future.
A life free of suffering isn’t free of pain. Sometimes you have to—let’s just pick random examples—wear a mask or get a vaccine in order to operate in a functional society. But because people like Dahlia are unwilling to endure a little pain for the common good, they invite suffering on an exponentially greater scale. Whether you want to call House of Shadows a symbol of racism or classism or just general injustice, the edifice that rebuilds itself to loom anew is, like most of A Sleight of Shadows, a potent metaphor wrapped in a tense and effective narrative.