The Aftermyth, by Tracy Wolff

 

Happy book birthday to The Aftermyth, by Tracy Wolff (middle grade, February 2026 Aladdin)!  Here's how my reading went: I was very happy to get a review copy, and looked forward to it lots, planning on posting about it today.  I started it one evening last week, read five pages, and thought "I will enjoy this." Two hours and 200 pages (out of 448 later, I thought "I want to keep reading because I am really enjoying this!"  Half an hour and another 50 pages read, I thought "I wish it wasn't bedtime; I want to keep reading."  But it was, and so I enjoyed finishing it the next day! From this you can gather that I found it fast, fun, and engrossing.

The Aftermyth is set in a magical Greek mythological boarding school in our real world.  Penelope and her twin brother are starting their first year there, and are confident they will be placed in Athena House, like their parents.  But Penelope gets off to a bad start when she's separated from her brother and reality goes wonky on her in unpleasant ways--the bridge she has to cross turns half way through from wood to snakes, for instance, and more mundanely the trek through the mud of a strange forest in which she finds herself lost wrecks the clean new shoes she carefully picked for her first impression ensemble (very real world middle school relatable-ness, which continues to be nicely interspersed with mythological happenings throughout the book).

And then, horror! Instead of calm, organized, life-of-the-mind Athena House, she's assigned to Aphrodite, the house of sparkles and glitter and glam.  Turns out, though, that though the Aphrodite kids might be everything her parents didn't want her to be, they have something the Athenas (including Penelope's parents and brother) lack--they are emotionally present and caring people.  And so by the end of the book she has realized that having best friends who really are there for her, who think enjoying life is reasonable, is a Very Good Thing, and she stops hoping she'll be moved over to Athena. (She also realized that the sweet snacks of Aphrodite are actually preferable to the apple slice snacks of Anthena, and even though I like a good Athena-esque library as much as anyone, the candy room she gets instead is pretty tempting...)

So that's one big arc of the story.  The other is the mystery of why strange things keep happening to Penelope; no one else, for instance, falls into the underworld when the ground beneath their feet vortexes on them, for instance.  Woven into the school part of the story are discussions of how myths are retold, and why (also really nice done, and I like this thought-provoking-ness lots!).  And this question, of who makes the stories and how and why, is central to the mystery.  

With plenty of splashy magical boarding school fun, a couple of cute guys such as a middle school kid might crush on, some exciting adventure bits, and a mythological mystery to be solved, it is very very easy for me to certain that the target audience will like this lots.  Though mythological boarding schools inevitable make on think of Percy Jackson, I would give this to kids who haven't met him yet.  This is a much more solidly middle grade story, with less epic danger (although more may come as the series continues) and more a feel of what middle grade life is like.  

Short answer:  if the second book were already written and was in my hands, I'd be reading it instead of writing this.

A Taste Of Magic (Park Row Magic Academy #1), by J. Elle

This year has been absolutely stellar for magical middle grade school stories; each one I've read has surprised me with its twists of the genre!  And A Taste Of Magic (Park Row Magic Academy #1), by J. Elle (August 30th 2022, Bloomsbury) is no exception--it is a fresh, delightful read!

12-year-old Kyana is pretty happy with her life in her neighborhood of Park Row.  Sure, her mom has to work way to hard because money is tight, and she's under pressure to well at school, even at math...but she has her very dear best friend, Nae, to make school better, and her very dear grandma to love and cook with at home.  Then she discovers she has magic, and she has to spend every Saturday at Park Row Magic Academy, even though the first day of class there is Nae's birthday party....and she can't tell anyone about the magic.

Kyana is determined to excel at magic, especially the Charms part of it, which seems most likely to help her mom out financially.  But even as she gets better at magic, she gets deeper into a web of lies with Nae about where she is on Saturdays, pushing their friendship to the breaking point.  To add to her worries, her grandma's mind is slowly being swallowed by Alzheimer's.  And then the bomb drops--the Park Row magic school is going to be closed due to lack of funding.  The other city magic schools, in whiter and richer neighborhoods, will stay open, and if Kyana can come up with several thousand dollars, she can finish her initial training at one of them.  If she can't (and her mother can't work any harder than she does, so it seems impossible) she'll loose her magic, just as she's finding out what her own special gift is and overcoming her self-doubt.

So wining a city wide baking contest with a sweet cash prize seems to be the obvious answer, and her grandma's recipes, which have a magic of their own, are perfect for it. But when Kyana inadvertently contaminates her first round entry of cupcakes with inadvertent magic, she creates a problem she can't fix alone.  She'll need every friend she has--old, new, and unexpected--and a bit of help from magical (and adorable) cat-like beings to fix things.  And she has to keep on baking, because she's not about to loose hope.

The various very relatable tensions in Kyana's life, with their real world echoes made me anxious at times.  But they are lightened beautifully by the wonder of her entry into a world of magic, by friendship and love, by delightful cooking, and of course magical "kittens."   And I was left feeling  warm and cozy, so excited by the #1 in the title -- I can't wait for more!

A sweet treat of a book!

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Hollowpox: the Hunt for Morrigan Crow (Nevermore #3), by Jessica Townsend

This past week my domestic tasks and my 7000 daily fitness steps for which my insurance will reward me ($25 a month, aka 2 books) have been made infinitely more palatable by the audiobook of Hollowpox: the Hunt for Morrigan Crow (Nevermore #3), by Jessica Townsend (hardover published by Little, Brown, October 2020 in the US). Gemma Whelan, the narrator, is brilliant!  (nb:  because I've listened to the whole series, I don't know how anything should be spelled, so I might make mistakes...)

This is the third installment of the story of a cursed girl, Morrigan Crow, who was whisked away to Nevermore in the Free State the night she was supposed to die, and who has found there a life of magic.  Morrigan, it turns out, is a Wundersmith, able to gather magic around her and use it to make marvels happen.  She's also the only Wundersmith in Nevermore; 100 years ago, a Wundersmith named Ezra Squall revealed himself as an evil monster, and is now an exile.  For a year, Morrigan studied with her cohort of other gifted kids at Wunsoc (the Wunderous Society), but no-one has taught her how to use her powers...except Squall, in brief, strange, and terrifying encounters.

This year is different.  This year she's introduced to a group of scholars studying the long gone Wundersmiths and their arts, with the help of Stolen Hours--vignettes of the past that can be visited.  Morrigan gets to visit Stolen Hours in which Wundersmith kids were taught by masters...and she is thrilled.  

But outside of Wunsoc, terrible things are happening in Nevermore.  Wuimals--persons who have animal bodies, or physical traits of animals, are becoming infected by a mysterious ailment, the Hollowpox, that first drives them into vicious frenzies, and then strips them of their intelligence, leaving them simply animals.  Wunimals have only been accepted as equals in society fairly recently, and when infected individuals attack other citizens (sometimes fatally), prejudice against them explodes, and increasingly harsh measures are taken to keep them off the streets.

Morrigan is desperately wants to help, but her only real hope is to make a deal with the man she fears as much as the Hollowpox, Ezra Squall....the one who created the disease.

On the one hand, it was rather a strain listening to a story of terrible contagion and bigotry and injustice.  It was almost too much of an echo of 2020.  On the other hand, though, this makes it a rather powerful and timely lens in which to look back at our own world's troubles, and reflect on those, and grow.  

The twists and turns of the plot (and there were many of these!), and even more so, the lavishness of the light fantastic soothed and engrossed me--these books, though not breaking any tremendously fresh new fantasy ground, have lovely, lovely magical superstructure to it that is just delightful! In this book, for instance,we get to travel to the library of Nevermore, and it is marvelous (and dangerous....).  Arguably, the magical whimsy is so generous that it slows the story down, but I am totally ok with that in this particular case (possibly because I was listening to it, and couldn't skim description the way I would while reading, and so was compelled to enjoy it for what it was).

Morrigan's story arc keeps progressing.  She is only 13, and still learning that her actions have consequences, and still making some questionable decisions about many things, but she's learning.  New levels and vistas of the magic of Nevermore are revealed in this book, and that's delightful too.  I would, I think, have liked more development of Morrigan's relationships with the other kids in her Wunsoc unit--there's not real deepening of this here. In general, there are lots of characters, and not enough time to develop them all, and because I'm interested in every one of them, I want more.

I also, of course, want the next book on audio now. It really hurt me to not be able to look at the end to see what would happen so I wouldn't have to worry, as I would have done if I'd been reading the phsycial book, but I think this way was better.