Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen ChoAce Books (Penguin Random House), 2015

Jenny over at Reading the End started her post about this book by noting that someone on Twitter described it as a “postcolonial Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” which was enough to pique my interest. I like books that are set in England at the time of the Napoleonic wars, but with magic (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, obviously, but also Sorcery & Cecelia and its sequels), and I’d actually been meaning to read something by Zen Cho for a while (this is her first novel, but someone I know recommended her short stories). So, yeah, I was in. And oh man, this was a fun read. It felt slow to get moving, but once it did, it was delightful.

So, right, the story. Zacharias Wythe is England’s first black Sorcerer Royal, and many of the other members of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers are not pleased. He’s a freed slave who was taught by the last Sorcerer Royal, and there are rumors that he killed his predecessor, despite Sir Stephen having raised him as a son, and that he killed Sir Stephen’s ancient familiar, Leofric, too—no one has seen Leofric since Zacharias took up the Sorcerer Royal’s staff. To make things worse, Zacharias comes to power at a trying time for thaumaturgy: there’s been a marked decline in the atmospheric magic levels in Britain; it seems like magic is running dry, and something must be done about it. And Zacharias doesn’t even particularly want to be Sorcerer Royal: he was happier being Sir Stephen’s secretary and would rather be devoting his time to scholarly/magical inquiries, though Sir Stephen clearly intended for him to be his successor. As Sorcerer Royal, Zacharias has to deal with things like politicians trying to pull him into a magical dispute that the sultan of an island in the Malacca Straits is having with the witches in his country. As if that’s not vexing enough, he’s roped into giving a talk at a school for gentlewitches—where magical young ladies are taught to suppress their magic, because it’s not deemed suitable for women to cast spells unless they’re lower-class/working women. At that school for gentlewitches, meanwhile, is Prunella Gentleman, an orphan who’s been raised by the school’s headmistress. She’s half-Indian, and knows nothing of her mother, and little of her father. One thing is clear: she’s rather more magical than it’s proper for a woman to be. You can probably guess that Zacharias’s story and Prunella’s will intertwine, in interesting ways. There’s more plot than I want to go into, but it’s all pretty great: there’s the arrival of Mak Genggang, a witch from that aforementioned island, and there are dragons and fairies and other magical creatures, and there’s lots of humor and spell-casting and some romance, and Prunella is a total badass, and I am delighted that this is supposed to be the first book in a trilogy.