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published 1994, Forge
Want to go to a place where magic is real? Forget about wishing on the second star to the right, or burrowing deep into your antique armoire. Just catch the A train uptown.
In Speak Daggers to Her, Rosemary Edghill give us a tantalizing glimpse of a world which exists inside our own. The price of admission is the willing suspension of disbelief. There are plenty of people who believe that magic is real, and who practice it on a daily basis. Edghill takes us inside that world, into the New York neopagan scene, peopled with characters both ordinary and wildly eccentric.
This story won't read as a fantasy to the cognoscenti. To those who believe in magic, this reads like a realistically paced mystery with a gritty attention to detail. Edghill doesn't spare her readers the seamy side of the Craft. Nor is she afraid to expose its tacky tawdriness when necessary. For the most part, she deals with familiar strangenesses gently, and her pages are filled with amusing shocks of recognition.
To the uninitiated, this is a novel of poignant detail, in which the characters' belief in magic is revealed to be the single colorful element in lives otherwise drab and desperate. Even Edghill's villains survive at the bare edge of urban poverty, making do with secondhand furniture and working mundane jobs. Edghill is aware of the banal face which true evil often wears: her villain, though he is the sorcerer and master of a frightened coven, in the real world works as a dry cleaner.
This could have very easily become a farce, a melodrama of magic realism, but Edghill is careful not to overdraw her characters. Her villain is more pathetic than powerful.
This subtlety extends to her characters' control over unseen forces. At the final battle, there are no great evocations, no summonings of light, no shields or swords or bolts of lightning. In the end, the magic she has chosen to show us reduces to simple, quiet belief, which as we know can suffice to stretch the boundaries of coincidence.
Review by Becky Parkhurst
Reviewed November 18, 1996
ISBN 0-312-85604-0
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