A Wicked Magic by Sasha Laurens celebrated its first book birthdays on July 28th!. I am thrilled to host the author today to share about witches and magic in this book. In this post, you’ll learn a little about A Wicked Magic (with links to where you can read an excerpt if you are interested in this YA Contemporary Fantasy), Sasha’s thoughts on witches, magic and community as portrayed in the book and Sasha herself. Let’s get started!
About A Wicked Magic
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets The Craft when modern witches must save teens stolen by an ancient demon in this YA fantasy-thriller debut.
Dan and Liss are witches. The Black Book granted them that power. Harnessing that power feels good, especially when everything in their lives makes them feel powerless.
During a spell gone wrong, Liss’s boyfriend is snatched away by an evil entity and presumed dead. Dan and Liss’s friendship dies that night, too. How can they practice magic after the darkness that they conjured?
Months later, Liss discovers that her boyfriend is alive, trapped underground in the grips of an ancient force. She must save him, and she needs Dan and the power of The Black Book to do so. Dan is quickly sucked back into Liss’s orbit and pushes away her best friend, Alexa. But Alexa has some big secrets she’s hiding and her own unique magical disaster to deal with.
When another teenager disappears, the girls know it’s no coincidence. What greedy magic have they awakened? And what does it want with these teens it has stolen?
Set in the atmospheric wilds of California’s northern coast, Sasha Laurens’s thrilling debut novel is about the complications of friendship, how to take back power, and how to embrace the darkness that lives within us all.
Content Warnings Excerpt on Penguin Teen
Witches, Magic and Community
By Sasha Laurens
Just as Dan and Liss didn’t set out to become witches, I didn’t set out to write a story about witches. Actually, before I started writing I don’t recall ever having thought much about witches (impossible to imagine now, but this was before the YA witch-boom). It evolved naturally out of the set-up of the story. I wanted to write a story about a friendship—the kind of friendship where you feel closer than sisters, you’re sure that all you’ll ever need is each other and no one else will ever understand you. At the same time, I wanted to show how that kind of friendship can turn toxic, because it isn’t healthy to be so dependent on one person.
Witchiness and magic work as a metaphor for that relationship. Dan and Liss find an old book containing a spell that promises to transform them into witches. They do the spell for kicks, but they’re shocked when it actually works. At first, magic brings them closer: It’s another piece of the secret world of their friendship that only the two of them know. But they end up using magic to avoid facing their problems, like the fact that Liss’s interest in boys far outpaces Dan’s and it’s driving a wedge in their relationship. Dan thinks another spell will bring them back together. But magic turns, well, wicked: it summons a demon who kidnaps Liss’s boyfriend, Johnny. That mistake destroys what’s left of their friendship. By the time the story begins, the girls aren’t even speaking, but if they want to rescue Johnny, they have to find a way to work spells together again.
Part of how they do that is by connecting with a larger magical community, through Dan’s new friend, Alexa, who’s recently tapped into a network of witches the other girls weren’t even aware of. That’s another reason witchiness fit so well into this story: it comes with an inherent tension about the individual and the community. Witches are in many ways outcasts from society, either because society fears and rejects them, or because the witches themselves don’t want anything to do with it. At the same time, everyone knows witches work in covens, right? They have their own special kind of community where they can be understood and accepted in all their witchy weirdness.
All three girls try to go it alone—Liss and Alexa by practicing solo-witchery, Dan by pretending nothing’s wrong—only to realize that they can’t reach their goals without help. But before the girls can come together in a demon-defeating magical mini-coven, each of them needs to work on some serious issues. In the fallout of their friendship, Dan and Liss need to figure out who they are, how they want to treat others and be treated by others. Liss needs to become more empathetic, and Dan must find internal strength instead of relying so heavily on others. Alexa, who is in a stable living situation for the first time, Alexa has to learn how to trust her friends.
Ultimately (mild spoiler alert?) the girls manage to form their own Witch Gang, a circle of honesty, support and magic. Being witches—the experiences they’ve gone through—marks them as different from the rest of the world, but when they have each other, that difference doesn’t feel so isolating anymore.
About Sasha Laurens
SASHA LAURENS grew up in Northern California, where she learned to drive on Highway 1’s switchback turns and got accustomed to the best weather in the world. After studying creative writing and literature at Columbia University, she lived in New York for years and, at various times, in Russia. She currently resides in Michigan, where she is pursuing a PhD in political science. A Wicked Magic is her first novel (Razorbill, July 2020).
Find her on Twitter and Instagram. You can learn more about her works on her website.
Check out the Book Review Index for Fantasy books I have read and reviewed.
Cover image: Photo by Breno Machado on Unsplash
I’m glad you enjoyed this book much more than I did!
I haven’t read it yet. 🙂 What did you think of it?