A review by wilybooklover
Unnatural Magic by C.M. Waggoner

adventurous funny mysterious medium-paced

4.0

This was a really fun mashup of genres — part fantasy, part murder mystery, part romance, part coming-of-age. I really enjoyed the complex worldbuilding in this and how naturally it was incorporated into the story; no info-dumping or clumsy expositional dialogue here. It's a queernorm world which has some very interesting exploration of gender, sexuality, privilege, and cultural conflicts. I loved that the magical system was based on maths and all about creating logical formulae and definitions. I also enjoyed that it was a racially diverse world; Onna, one of the POV protagonists, seemed to be Black-coded, another main character was coded as East Asian, and several secondary characters were also POC/mixed race. 

There were a few plotting issues. The two main plotlines were a little too disparate through most of the book and felt like they were kind of forced together towards the end rather than naturally converging. It was a bit jarring jumping straight from Onna's POV into Tsira's or Jeckran's. Some of the subplots seemed a bit pointless or didn't really make sense
(e.g. Tsira's boxing matches, or the part where Mon Del Ras is killed off and an entire brothel was infiltrated, which didn't quite seem to jive with the killer's motives and methods).
The villain was very predictable and easy to guess. 

Overall though, this was great fun and very entertaining. 
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