⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 Stars – This was an old favourite but on a re-read it didn’t hold up! Too much style and too little substance.
Format: Audiobook (Spotify)
Read: January 2025
I originally read the Shades of Magic trilogy in 2016-2017, when I was 28-29 years old. I loved it then, I was so happy to find a fantasy series I enjoyed reading! It was engaging and pacey, and it didn’t spend pages on dry world-building. Having such fond memories of this series had made me keen to reread them and see if they held up.
I have read other books by V.E. Schwab. I loved her adult books Vicious and Vengeful, and I enjoyed her YA book Our Dark Duet too (though I never read more of that series). However, I read her most recent novel The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue a couple of years ago and I hated it. I couldn’t cope with the style (everything is smokey, everyone’s hair is floppy and/or curly), the characters that felt contrived to appeal to social media, and how unforgivably boring and slow it was. Just a waste of a wonderful premise!
This experience had me worried about revisiting Shades of Magic because I’ve read a lot more and a greater variety of books in 9 years. Prior to mid-2017 I’d been a school librarian and spent 4 years reading children’s and YA books. I would describe this series as only a degree away from a YA fantasy series, the characters are 19 and early twenties and it sticks with servicing the plot over developing characters. There is nothing wrong with that, except that my tastes have changed!
You’d have seen my rating at the top of this review, and I’m sure gleaned from all the disclaimers I’ve led with, that I didn’t enjoy my re-read in 2025, as a 36-year-old! I will admit that I did have a problem with the audiobook format and more precisely the narrator. Stephen Crossley is a fine narrator but he cannot do female voices well, and one of the main characters is a nineteen-year-old girl! He had Lila alternating between an annoying whiny child voice and sounding like an old fishwife. I’d always imagined her voice to be more dry in tone with an almost sarcastic edge, but that isn’t how he read her. She is already quite an annoying and frustrating character, but the narration really made her unbearable for me.
But the narration was only part of it. Overall I just found the book a lot of style over substance (like Addie La Rue) and the characters too shallow and contrived. Kell is given the most depth, he has more of an inner life and a past than Lila does but little of it felt authentic to me. His relationship with Rhy, and the other Royals, never rang true because it was all telling and no showing (you know I hate that). I cringed every time his floppy hair covering his black eye was mentioned, as a teenager of the early 2000s I could think of nothing other than posers with emo fringes and heavy eyeliner! Rhy himself just felt like a token bisexual for a bit of LGBT representation and had no character beyond a “hedonistic Prince who likes to fuck” (I remember this is an issue for the whole series, and annoyed me in my first read!).
Lila as a character doesn’t make sense to me because the author holds too much back in this first book. She deliberately gives us no backstory for Lila other than she’s an orphan and has lived a hard-knock life on the streets. She’s smart and tough and has stolen and conned others for survival. For some reason, all she wants is to be a pirate… which is such an immature dream when she has no plan other than “get a ship, be a pirate”. We are told that she’s ruthless but then we see her doing things like giving her last few coins to a picked-on beggar child and chasing down his bullies, so there are annoying contradictions. Like Kell, she felt like a poser to me! Stop trying so hard! There are also heavy hints that she is not what she seems because she has a false eye and doesn’t die when travelling between worlds like she probably should have… hmm I wonder what…
Now I think about it I think my big problem rereading this book is the characters are too young. This whole story would be better if everyone involved was older. Twenty-year-olds aren’t very interesting to me these days! Nobody has enough edge, it all feels too clean and shiny. I need more than just tropes to enjoy a book, I need to be engaged by characters or a mystery, something.
This is not a bad book at all, Schwab can write an engaging book! If you like YA fantasy, if you liked Addie LaRue, if you enjoy books with “just vibes” (Schwab is great at vibes!) then you’d probably love this. I loved it when I was 28! But now I’m a more seasoned 36-year-old who has honed her reading tastes I just need to feel more, and it didn’t make me feel anything other than exasperated.
Needless to say, I won’t be bothering to read the others in the series!
Now we know, some favourites from the past need to stay as pleasant memories! It’s funny to me that this did not hold up, but the Young Adult sci-fi fairytale series The Lunar Chronicles did!
REVIEW SUMMARY
I LIKED
- The idea of London existing in parallel magical worlds, with only a few people able to cross between, is very cool.
- It is quite pacey, and the writing is atmospheric.
I DIDN’T LIKE
- Style over substance.
- Characters are undeveloped with too much telling and little showing.
- Everyone is too young, it’s hard to make twenty-year-olds interesting to me!
- The narrator is not good at female voices, and made Lila even more irritating that she is on the page!
