Heather Fawcett’s prose, as usual, was gorgeous, and the descriptions of the cats were delightful. I usually have a hard time getting invested in animal characters, but they were hands-down the best part of the book!

Unfortunately, the rest of this book felt underbaked. The setting was vague (kind of French, kind of old-timey? I couldn’t tell you the decade it was set in if you paid me, although I was thrown off at one point when the cats were described as “unhoused”, lol). The characters felt similarly under-sketched. We are told a lot of information about them - Agnes is organized (is she?? Because she kind of seems like a mess), Havelock is the biggest scariest dark magician in the world (IS HE?? Because he kind of seems like an annoying little guy!!), the world apparently had a near-apocalyptic event that happened several years ago but everything’s good now (what???). The whole showing-vs-telling thing doesn’t matter in Emily Wilde because it’s a journal, but this book isn’t a journal!

The least-thought-out part of the book is the role of magic in this society. It feels like the book is trying to say something about magic, but it doesn’t know what. At certain points magicians are treated like a marginalized group, with targeted laws against them and parents throwing young magicians out on the streets. But unlike real-world marginalized groups, many magicians seem to cause real and serious damage to the people and things around them, which makes it a really questionable metaphor if that’s what the author was going for! Some of the magicians seem straight-up evil, for no reason that is ever discussed. All that matters to the story, of course, is that OUR magician is unfairly judged and targeted!! Magic, throughout the story, is shown as temperamental and dangerous, and Agnes is understandably wary of it. But the story also seems to demand that she open up and embrace it, because it’s not that bad!! Except for when it is. No one in this story seems to know how they should feel about magic, except that it’s good sometimes and bad sometimes and we should all just go along with it depending on whether it’s in the interest of the main characters’ romantic arc.

Overall this book just felt a lot more piecemeal than the Emily Wilde series - as if, instead of starting as a single seamless concept, it started as a bunch of pictures on a mood board and publisher requests (cats! Magic! Baked goods! Similar chemistry to Emily and Wendell!). I enjoyed many of the individual elements but felt that the overarching story was underwhelming.