Dime Store Magic

"Kelly Armstrong is a fantastic urban fantasy author, who I feel doesn’t get quite as much attention as I would expect her to. She’s well known – she’s not dying for readers or anything—but when you’re listing off who’s really solid in the genre, she doesn’t come up nearly as often as I would expect. She started her series with Bitten , which was a werewolf romance and is, as far as I’m concerned, the shakiest in the series; because when your supernatural being is literally an infectious disease that can be passed down without consent, things get a little bit questionable. But she realized after writing the first two books that she wanted her universe to be wider, and she started introducing other types of supernatural creatures—which takes us to Dimestore Magic , where she brought in the witches. Our first witch is Paige, who is a delight. She’s a little bit of a fashionista. She’s a plus-sized urban fantasy heroine, which is not something you see super often. Then in addition to the witches, you have the sorcerers. Now, it is a little bit gender essentialist: in this universe, witches and sorcerers are gender-locked types of magical beings. All witches are girls, all sorcerers are boys. In Dimestore Magic , we meet the unthinkable, the daughter of a witch and a sorcerer: Savannah. She should not exist. She is technically a cross-species individual, and an abomination in the eyes of many – both witches and sorcerers—because they’ve been at war for centuries. Sorcerer magic is officially more powerful than witch magic. They have a reputation for having better spells and better capabilities, and Paige is obsessed with the idea that it wasn’t meant to be like this – that there used to be other spells that the witches have lost, or have cut themselves off from because they are trying too hard to play it safe and be the nice kids. You follow Paige through her coming of age as she’s trying to figure all this stuff out, deal with Savannah, and of course inevitably have a romance with a sorcerer—because you don’t have a setup like that without it turning into a star-crossed romance. This is book three of Kelly Armstrong’s Women of the Other World sequence, and she went on for quite some time. I believe the series ended with book thirteen, and really my only complaint about the series as a whole is that I like the witches best of all. We got two books with Paige, and then she didn’t go back. Having written my own series with a shifting narrator, I feel that part of that may have been that people were not as open to Paige as they could have been because she was the first narrator after Elena, who is the person they met and fell in love with in Bitten . There’s resistance to your second narrator."