By Meghan Mazzaferro
Content warning: blood and gore, murder, racism, transphobia, police brutality
Blood Like Magic is a YA low fantasy novel set in a near-future Toronto, which follows Voya, a chronically indecisive Black witch, as she comes into her magic and struggles to define herself within a large and respected witch family. This book deals with themes of growing up, defining yourself, and finding the balance between doing what’s best for you and what’s best for your family while also discussing the experience of Black communities in Toronto and Canada.
When a witch hits puberty they are given a Task by one of their ancestors and the completion of this Task will determine the strength of their magic, as well as the strength of the special power, or gift, they are given by their ancestors. For Voya’s family, their gifts are used to keep the family together in their ancestral home, and the pressure to receive a good and profitable gift weighs on Voya, whose reputation for being indecisive already has her worried about completing her Task. Then Voya is given the hardest Task in witch memory: to kill the love of her life, or her entire bloodline will lose their magic. If this isn’t hard enough, Voya has never been in love, so now she must find someone and fall in love with them within a month… all so she can kill them.
Over the course of this book, Voya struggles with her indecisiveness and has to face the ways in which her sense of self has been defined by her family. Her relationships with each of her relatives shape the choices she makes—and the growing bond she feels with Luc, the troublesome, prickly boy she needs to seduce and kill—forces her to grapple with what she wants and what she’s willing to give up. Throw in a family mystery involving a lost relative and the world’s leading geneticist—and Luc’s surrogate father—and you have an immersive and captivating story focusing on the people we become and what forces shape us.
This book includes a diverse cast of characters and engages readers with topics such as racism, transphobia, colonization, income inequality, microaggressions, and provides a commentary on life for minorities in Canada today. However, this book is also full of hope and spends a great deal of time exploring the role of ancestry and history and the ways the modern world can help maintain those connections to the past. Set in the near future, this book paints a picture of how new technologies can help make lives easier and work to foster connections—if we can let go of the prejudices of the past.
The writing in this book is fun and fast-paced, and Voya, in spite of her indecision, is an excellent narrator through which the reader is introduced to this world of witches and technology. While the marketing of this book highlights the angst of Voya and Luc’s cursed romance, the real star of this book is the familial relationships highlighted between Voya, her cousins, and her older relatives, all of whom have unique and compelling personalities and struggles that hint at a broader universe of books to come following the Thomas witches. That being said, this book can also be read as a standalone and has a lot of power as a single story about family, love, and individuality.
I would recommend Blood Like Magic to any fans of low fantasy, YA fiction, witches, books set in Toronto, or to any readers looking to read a futuristic coming-of-age story that deals with questions of race, identity, and family, sprinkled with magic.