In the world of Higher Magic, magic is real – but not in the fantastic, wand-waving style of Harry Potter or Dr. Strange. The workings are a little more intricate and subtle; with the right complex rituals, iconography, and incantations, you just might be able to convince “consensus reality” to budge a bit.
That makes magical research an academic field like any other: two parts comp lit, one part rhetoric, and one part arcane engineering. It’s powerful and interesting enough to draw grant funding and cement the reputations of a university or two, certainly, and mages are respected, degreed professionals — much like doctors, lawyers, and MBA’s (in some circles).
Dorothe (aka “Bartleby”) is a doctoral student working on her digimancy degree, and for the most part her life is just like any other student’s: she TA’s a bunch of undergrad classes and slaves over her thesis while scraping by on a meager stipend. She’s also carrying a little extra baggage in the form of a childhood divination that foretells either a spectacular flame-out… or possibly a great triumph! At this point in her postgraduate career, it’s starting to look a lot more like the former.
For the first 100+ pages, I LOVED this book. There’s just the right balance of mining the banal idiosyncrasies of academia for a bit of comic pathos while also doing a little bit of world-building and introducing Bartleby in all of her messy, anxiety-ridden glory. Once the plot starts picking up steam, though, it becomes a much simpler and less interesting story, following Dorothe and her friends as they struggle to unravel a nasty curse that is literally erasing students from existence.
Higher Magic is at its best when it’s holding a magnifying glass up to the idiosyncratic norms of grad school and extrapolating those into a world where a good thesis might reshape not just opinions but the actual fabric of reality. Once the action picks up, all of that gets left behind and the story flattens out into a generic “race against time” cascade of set-pieces and conflicts, with a little romantasy thrown in for flavor. (Side note: the annoying trope of “how could the amazingly sexy guy/gal be interested in plain li’l ol’ me? It must be a mistake, I’m not special enough for anyone to love me” is solidly in the top-10 of my Most Hated list… and climbing!)
PASS IF: You want your villains to be as interesting as your heroes, and you’re looking for a read that sticks in your head for a few days after you finish
READ IF: You just want a slightly different twist on a genre staple, -OR- you’re a grad student who already knows that tenured faculty are assholes and would gleefully welcome another (fictional) example of just how much those elitist jerks abuse their authority
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