Thalia is a stage magician with her show as Lady of The Lake. When her livelihood is threatened she will start a cascade of events which will eventually allow her to learn her true self and her true powers.

There was a lot in this novel. Besides Thalia being a stage magician and pretty emancipated around the start of the 20th century, there is a whole magic world related to it. You see, real magic and stage magic combined. Thalia believes she is a simple Solitaire, as opposed to Traders (shapeshifters who for some reasons make up the crème de la crème of New York society) and Sylvestri (nature people who are never really well explained but must have some kind of power also). Add to this the gruesome Manticores, who hunt unexperienced Traders in order to suck their magic out of them, and a murder charge, and it is quite a lot.

However, it was an interesting read and while I had hoped that some parts of the worldbuilding would have been explained a bit better without turning it into an infodump, I liked this version of New York. I was a bit worried in the beginning that by throwing all these things at the reader the story would feel overcrowded, but it didn’t really. Still, I had the feeling it was missing a little something that I can’t really put in words.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

I made it to the end of this and am unsure how I feel about the whole thing.

It didn't end all easy with her being the hero, but she still managed to be the hero and do things and figure out things that long-time magicians were unable to do and figure out.  She's also still the stupid "little girl" that I disliked at the beginning of the first book, even though she was 19 then (and acted like a pre-teen) and 20 now.  

The ending was kinda super easy, though.  That's the worst part of the whole thing.  The defeats were still too easy and deaths happened because of her stupidity, and people's lives were put into jeopardy because of her stupidity, yet everyone is so happy she's alive and no one seems pissed that she caused these issues.

<sigh>

I have book three on my Kindle.  Part of me wants to read it after re-reading the book description - I want to see if it gets better, I want to see how she uses the information she now has, I want to see what messed up position her stupidity puts her into, I want to see if it's the way that I figured out it would be at the middle of this book - but the other part of me is just done with the longing for a guy who apparently longs for her back.  A guy who is 35 and a girl who just turned 20.  A guy who is her teacher and a girl who is his apprentice.  

I didn't go into this with knowledge that it was a romance - a dumb one, at that.  The genre says nothing about romance.  It's advertised as steampunk, which I absolutely adore, and is marked as "Teen & Young Adult > Historical Fiction" and "Teens > Fantasy > Paranormal & Urban."  

This book is irritating me.  The first book was more about her learning and the adventure she took to save her teacher's life, but now that she's decided she's in love with him (she just turned 20, he's 35 or so - and there's an unwritten rule about not getting involved with your apprentice, which she seems to not care about), it's mostly about her love for him, and her dreamily wondering if he loves her too, blah blah blah, and the whole thing with two different magicians who are bad guys after her seems like an afterthought.  And, once again, she is taking off on her own to confront these magicians, even though she is only an apprentice, and has been an apprentice for less than a year.  Bad guys that even experienced magicians have not been able to capture.

If this book ends all easy, I'm not even going to bother with number three.

It's taken me forever and a day to even attempt to read this. Memories of the first book were not making this very appealing and it's ended up sitting on my NG shelf for almost 2 1/2 years.

However once i committed to reading it I was relieved to find that this is a better book than the first in a number of ways, mostly because there are more characters than just Ceony and Emery. Ceony is still pretty annoying as main characters go but she has a slightly better attitude this time around and doesn't whine nearly as much. Nor is she prying into Emery's life and belongings like she did in the first novel.

She is however, just as dim as she was in the first book in that she is adamant that she, an apprentice magician, can take on other dangerous magicians without any help and it's no surprise that her decisions cause problems for everyone else.

The romance between Ceony and Emery still leaves me cold, it doesn't feel right and to be honest it's annoying that Ceony is just so hellbent on trying to make it happen. She also needs to seek medical advice for the chronic blushing problem she has, any encounter she had with Emery seemed to set this off, pair this with her pale skin and reddish/orange hair and it's not a pretty picture that's conjured up.

The world building is yet again something that didn't work for me, the time period is confusing with some of the details and it would seem that the author has 'modernised' the period with details of transport, food and materials that really don't seem to fit the time. I also found the magic wasn't very well explained and I struggled to grasp what the author was describing.

On the positive side this was a fairly fast read and a lot more engaging than book 1, I'll again put this down to the fact that there were a number of other characters whom Emery and Ceony spent time with, this seemed to help keep the plot moving along and not stagnate as it did in the first book when a lot of the story was just Ceony.

Better than the first book but I don't think I'll be picking up the third one, my interest was slightly peaked but not enough to continue.