booksummaryandreview.com

Museum of Magic by Beth Revis Book Review

The Museum of Magic by Beth Rivas. Now, I ran across Beth Rivas not very long ago. I was enjoying one of her—I think it was a three-novella—I'm trying to remember. Well, it was kind of sci-fi, and it was really fun, and I had a great time with it. So when I saw her name pop up again I was like, all right, I got to pick it up. I got to see what's going on. 

The other one is the Chaotic Orbits one, two, and three. I know for sure I've done How to Steal a Galaxy, and I think I did the third one as well, unless I forgot it. But I think I've done the Chaotic Orbits series, at least books two and three. I enjoyed them, had a good time, and wanted to read this one, which is more of a fantasy novel for probably a little closer to YA.

Well, I have some feelings about it, so we're going to talk about it, but we're going to dive into the summary first and go from there.

The Museum of Magic by Beth Rivas was first published December 1st, 2022, but it is going to be released in another edition. Tanor Media has released the audiobook of it or will be releasing the audiobook. I did have the audiobook version of it, just letting you guys know.

Emmy Caster grew up in a small town near Salem. Her home is centuries old, originally built by an ancestor renowned for witchcraft. Her grandfather converted the house into the Museum of Magic, collecting the arcane and putting it on display for all to see. But Emmy knows one thing for absolute certain—magic is not real.

But when a fae boy named Puck appears inside her home, the broken remains of a centuries-old witch bottle at his feet, at nearly the same time a hunter arrives on her doorstep, weapons drawn. Ghostly shadows call to her from the mirror, and Emmy's grandfather is missing—perhaps kidnapped by a nefarious fae, perhaps victim to those who prey on magic. History hides the truth. 

Puck tells Emmy that she has the power to protect magical beings. He's fae, but he's also her only ally. Together, they explore the real-life history of witchcraft mingled with the unknown influence of the fae. Emmy must reconstruct the witch bottle, save her grandfather, and maybe even fall in love. But she has to be careful—you can never trust a fae.

There's a lot going on in this book, and one of my biggest critiques, which I kind of wish had been fleshed out more, is that the way we get from point A to point B to point C is not always clear. Emmy is literally helping her grandfather in a witch museum about one of her ancestors, and yet she doesn't believe in magic. That was the very first thing she says. She absolutely knows magic isn't real. And I'm just like, okay.

But within five minutes of the audiobook, she's confronted with magic. And I'm just like, okay, I don't even know why we had to go that direction of "magic's not real." Well, here it is, slaps you in the face, and of course it's real. I think she should have been cautiously suspicious, like it could have been real. My ancestor was potentially a witch. But I get the idea that magic is just science we haven't fully explained yet. Okay, fine.

But I love the idea of magic. Like if someone told me, "Yeah, magic's real," I'd be like, "Hell yeah." I'm not going to be one of those "Oh yeah, no." If someone told me, "Hey, there's some ghosts around the corner," I'd be like, "Oh man, that's so cool." I am not a disbeliever. 

I will pretty much believe anything. I'm not saying I'm gullible; I'm just saying my mind is so open that you could probably fit an entire filing cabinet of speculative things inside of it. I'm not saying I'm a conspiracy theorist because I don't believe that hard in things, but I'm totally open to the fact—sure, why not? That's how I feel about it.

So for her to be like, "Oh no, magic's not real. I just work in this magic shop, this museum of magic, and magic's not real," I was just like, okay, I don't really enjoy that aspect of it. But quickly she is confronted with what I would call a witch hunter and a fae. So she's going to have to learn pretty quickly that witches and magic and fae and creatures of lore are real. She's going to have to figure it out.

I think the premise of the book was incredibly cute, but you definitely saw that Emmy and Puck were going to fall for each other a little bit. I'm still a little frustrated with how the book ended because I didn't feel like there was a lot of closure. Prefacing that with the fact that this says it's book number one of a Museum of Magic series, I don't know how many books there may be. I don't know if it's a duology or a trilogy. I can't tell you. I can just tell you the end of this book did not give me very much closure, and I was left like, is that how we're going to leave it?

So I'm going to give it four stars because I did enjoy it, but her thinking like, "Oh yeah, magic's not real," and then immediately we have to jump into, "Okay, yeah, sure, magic's real," was a little annoying. I love the narrator. The narrator is somebody I know I've heard before and loved that so much. She did a fantastic job, and we dive pretty quickly into the action.

One of the things is we learn from the beginning that Emmy's grandfather has gone to England, or Europe, for some reason, and he said he was going to be gone for the summer. But now Emmy is convinced—and I'm not even sure where along the way we decided—that he was kidnapped or how we even got there. We didn't get a ransom note or anything, but suddenly she is just convinced her grandfather's been kidnapped. We didn't have a lot of arrows pointing in that direction.

Another aspect was that I thought we were going to learn about witches through history or women who were accused of being witches, only to learn they were mortal women, and then take their stories back to the museum to give it more merit, to make it more lucrative for tourists. Maybe we're not working toward that yet, but I would love to see that for this story. 

There were absolutely women who were persecuted for being witches who were not practicing anything other than maybe herb lore or helping in childbirth or maybe making beer. That's where some of the lore came from.

People accused women—your neighbor's cow passed away, so it must be your neighbor, so they must have cursed you, so let's burn the wife. The sheer logic is baffling. I'm seeing a lot of it in current political climate where there's no logic applied to how we got from point A to point B. 

A lot of this book does that. I don't want to say that in a super negative way, but it is a little negative from my perspective because the character's thinking process on the mystery is not incredibly clear. It doesn't make a lot of sense in my thoughts.

The ending is incredibly abrupt. Someone else also says the ending is incredibly abrupt. It's like the writer decided, "Oh, I'm going to make this a series. Let me just cut it off here. It'll leave people wanting more." Not really. I mean, yes, I'm going to read the next one because I want to know what happens. But if I hadn't enjoyed the story as much, I probably wouldn't be interested in picking up the next book because for me, that's where the pacing felt off.

I do like weaving in some of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet and other quotations. I like that we seem to weave in other witch lore, spirits like Will-o'-the-Wisps and Jack-o'-the-Lanterns. The Jack one was really cute when he popped up and then dropped his lantern, and I was like, "Oh no, his lantern." Those cute little characters add a lot of personality.

For me though, I don't know. There's something about Emmy—I'm not saying anything harsh—there's something about her that made it hard to like her a lot. Lindsay states that she likes the main character for the most part and feels it's hard to make a 17-year-old girl who's lost her mentor not super whiny. She's a little whiny. Maybe not super whiny, but more whiny than I wanted. I didn't realize she was only 17. I thought she was older. I wasn't certain.

This particular person also deducted a star for typos and formatting errors in the book. But I think if this book released as an ebook in 2022 and we're moving toward a print version, a lot of those are probably going to be corrected. I had the audiobook, so I didn't get any of the typos or formatting errors. The narration was very well done. I felt like we were building up to stuff in the ending, but we were left wanting. It wasn't a "wow" moment; it was more like, "That's where you're going to leave it? Okay."

I like the book. I like the premise. I think we need to clean it up because there's a lot going on and we're not linear in how we get from point A to point B. When she's trying to put the mystery together, it's not intuitive for the reader or Emmy. 

And this girl who didn't believe in magic, who has only believed in magic for like three days, suddenly believes in magic, potentially has magic, and potentially is a pretty powerful witch. I was like, okay, we need to figure some of that out. She seems totally fine going from 0 to 100 with almost no hesitation.

Overall, that's my biggest critique of this book. When I run across the second book, I will bring it on board and we will talk about it too because I do like Beth Rivas's writing. She has characters who have to work together, have an attraction, but also rub each other the wrong way. She has that niche, because we saw that in the Chaotic Orbit series as well. Those characters were kind of enemies, kind of lovers, lots of attraction, annoying each other constantly. I saw some of that in this as well. This felt a little younger, a little more YA, so less mature in the way they come about it.

Also read: Memento Monstrum by Jochen Till Book Review

Also read: The Case of the Damaged Detective by Drew Hayes Book Review

Also read: Carl's Doomsday Scenario: Dungeon Crawler Carl book 2 by Matt Dinniman 

Also read: The Midnight Carnival by Kenny Gould Book Review

Also read: The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki Book Review