I quite enjoyed this. It has something quiet and dreamily descriptive at times, but without losing track of the story. And I liked Faris a lot, with her loyalty and her occasional unapologetic honesty. ( )

I had no idea that Caroline Stevermer had written adult fantasies, so I was excited to encounter this vintage title in a used bookstore.

A College of Magics is an alt-history gaslight fantasy, part school story and part Ruritanian romance. In blending genres, Stevermer takes structural risks that almost made me put down the book. The first several chapters are largely narration, and the story develops very organically and episodically.

I kept reading for Faris. The young duchess of Galazon, gawky, headstrong, and equal parts self-assured and self-conscious, she is a splendid, unforgettable character. The other highlight here is Stevermer's confidence with her source material—she has an incredible command of the language and culture of early twentieth-century Europe, with just a subtle twist of magic and whimsy for flavoring.

Despite the slow start, the tension ratchets up as the book progresses, and the last third is exciting and well-plotted (and features one of the funniest examples of a Chekhov's gun that I've encountered in fiction). It's a pleasure to encounter a novel that delivers on all its narrative promises.

Definitely a quirky book, but some serious talent behind it - on the whole, a pretty excellent light fantasy read.

ETA: Apparently when they reprinted this, they marketed it as YA and as a "better than Harry Potter" magical school story. OH NOES. Older teens would enjoy this book, but stylistically it is really not YA at all. ( )

Took me a while to get through this one. I bought it during the spring and finished it in November. It's a bit of a slow, dry read, but the characters and premise are interesting enough to keep you going. The plot soon takes a turn and picks up speed... but ultimately I felt the story left more questions than answers. The whole theme seems to be the nature of magic, but magic in this world is never really explained. Perhaps because there's a second book? We shall see. ( )

10/21/2023 I read this book some 15 years ago, per my records, but I was surprised that I remembered barely anything about it (that's unusual for me). This time, I "got" the story. I liked it much better. It made more sense to me somehow. I suspect it will stick.

It isn't a difficult story -- more or less ordinary girl finds out she isn't as ordinary as she thought, that her life and her future aren't what she thought they would be, people around her are more than she thought, and so forth. It turned a lot of tropes over on their sides, which was good, but used them as tropes. It's clever, it's fun, it's thoughtful. and it's a good read. ( )

Stevermer, Caroline. A College of Magics. 1994. College of Magics No. 1. Starscape, 2002.
Caroline Stevermer’s A College of Magics has inspired thoughtful and adamant reviews that treat the book in very different ways. Some readers have seen it as a forerunner to Harry Potter, whose first volume was published three years later. However, its treatment of magic more resembles the allegorical symbolism of the Narnia series of C. S. Lewis that it does the wand-waving of Rowling’s characters, so some readers see College as a spiritually meaningful work. Set in an Edwardian-era girl’s school where magic is learned though it is not exactly taught, it seems to add a welcome and clever feminist spin to an often male-dominated genre. Others see it as a traditional YA historical romance or a BFF story. There seems to be widespread agreement that the book’s title is misleading, because heroine Faris and her circle leave the school early, after which the book becomes a road adventure. It is difficult to find a clear dramatic focus. After the college section, there is a kidnapping story, a romance, a dynastic drama, and a plot that involves saving the universe from a magical rift. All these story patterns are present, and that may be one of the book’s flaws.
Finally, for me, the prose style made the book a slog. There was not much sentence variety or telling detail. The book’s episodic structure made its thematic threads hard to hang onto. 3 stars. ( )