Mister Magic by Kiersten White

 

This novel at least seemed at first to have a lot in common thematically with last night's aborted read, but that eventually seemed not to be entirely the case. Sure, the POV character (and her circle of friends) were stuck in a reliving their past trauma/s thing, same as last night's book, but *Mister Magic* is Horror--really really noisy Horror, not at all subtle--so the traumas end up being more monstrous and somehow more believable for being less plausible. There's some real murk in the middle, really rough going, I almost stopped reading several times, but the novel pulls itself together around the ending (not enough to justify the slog, but somewhat) and then the acknowledgments make the subtext clear that this really is a novel about growing up in a religion that insists on strict conformity; this is not a shock, when I said it was a noisy novel, I meant it. The prose is at best nothing special, the characters other than the primary POV tend to blur into like a couple of tags each without much depth. Ms. White has written a number of YA novels before this, I have to wonder if the lack of subtlety is a carryover from that. Not a DNF, but barely; not a particularly good novel.