I wasn’t sure about this one by Jennifer Moorman because it’ didn’t really grab me. It wasn’t the characters, story, or setting, which were all cute right from the get-go, but the writing style. However, because I had an ARC in hand and wanted to give it a fair shot, I read on… until I was hooked and finished it up in like two days. The Magic All Around is a bit cozy (which many readers will appreciate, just not so much me most of the time), but it is also magic realism and romance, and will lure you in with quaintness and lovable characters.

Lillith has just died, leaving her young-twenties daughter, Mattie, adrift in a world that had been steered and dominated by her. Mattie heads to Ivy Ridge, Georgia, where she will go to the funeral and then take off for more of the adventurous, moorless life she had led with her mother. But Aunt Penelope and the rest of the family think she needs to stay in the mysterious, magical, family home, and Mattie is finally convinced when she finds out her inheritance is tied to a scavenger hunt that her mother left for her… because, you know, her mother knew exactly when she was going to die and what was going to happen, even what romantic strings left dangling that she could tug from the grave.

So, yes, I read this as an ARC. It took me a long time because I got swamped with book club reads very suddenly when I decided I needed to join six book clubs in the new year. (Technically, it had nothing to do with the new year so it does not count as a resolution.) When I didn’t get immediately whisked into the world of Magic All Around, I finished a bunch of book club reads I needed to have done ASAP. Then I realized I was being a butt by not prioritizing the ARCs I had taken and agreed to read, however informally. So I returned to reading Magic and, well, you already heard what happened.

I mean, the pitch for this one really called to me, in the first place. It is magical realism, I suppose, though it feels different from the usual magical realism. With the whole cozy thing, even the romance, it feels like a different genre. And, well, magical realism is sometimes limited, by definition, to literary fiction, which this one is not. The writing itself is more straight-forward, more story-telling a la Hallmark (which I’m not saying is a bad thing. People love these genres and devour them). With the whole small-town-heals-all-ills kinda thing. Whatever.

I don’t have that much to say here. I was not super into the writing style (which I keep saying, but more specifically, trite descriptions and choppy sentence flow as well as strange pacing choices), but Penelope immediately appealed to me. You can see the ending(s) coming from page one, which is again part of the cozy genre (because they you feel safe and warm and happy the whole way through, thus cozy). There is a certain amount of sparks that fly in the romance(s), though not as much as I would like. I’m also not sure that hearing Jonathan’s POV on top of Penelope’s and Mattie’s added to the story. (I also wasn’t always a fan of his, and their meet-cute was a little hard to sustain, believability-wise.) I would have had less of him and more Penelope, actually, but that’s not what we’re doing these days, is it? (Which is why, maybe, it would have been better: hear from the subplot POV more than the love interest POV.)  Part of this might be because I am like Penelope’s age and certain aspects of her life are dreamy. I can relate to her and I want a magical house and magic hands, or whatever. Also, there is a whole lotta cheese. Some people love cheesiness in their books. I don’t. Nor do I like descriptions of cheesy art or of food or meals that don’t really make sense because they are so cheesy. There are some more serious themes here, but I didn’t feel emotionally invested enough to, like, cry over the book or anything. In the end, I just wanted to keep those pages turning to see these cute peeps in this cute town with their cute side-characters bring all the cute subplots and cute mysteries to a cute ending. And I was basically satisfied: the ending was the one I expected even though I was worried for like a chapter.

QUOTES:

“I was angry, and angry arguments are ugly and unfair, and I always regret what I say” (p163).