Magic or Madness

Reviewed by Jocelyn Pearce for TeensReadToo.com

Reason Cansino has always been taught to fear her grandmother, Esmeralda. Reason's mother, Sarafina, has taken them all over Australia, mostly to remote Aboriginal settlements. Reason has only been to a real school once, but Sarafina has taught her lots of things, mostly math and some science.

Reason has been happy with her life, but when Sarafina goes crazy--really crazy, as in trying to kill herself instead of her usual craziness consisting of things like making them walk in straight lines for days--all of that comes to an end. Reason is sent to live with Esmeralda in Sydney. She's expecting the dark, scary house of her mother's stories. The one where Sarafina's cat was murdered. The house show more where dark magic takes place--imaginary magic, of course, as Sarafina has always said that magic isn't real. It's too illogical.

What Reason finds, however, is a spacious, light house, not at all witchy. There are no animal sacrifices in the living room, no bubbling cauldrons in the kitchen. That can't undo the belief that years of Sarafina's stories have created, though. Reason is sure that something is going on underneath the surface, and she's got to run away and get out of Sydney as soon as possible. She's got to rescue Sarafina from the loony bin where she's been locked up.

Sydney's not all bad, though. Reason meets Esmeralda's neighbor, a boy about her age named Tom. She'll be sorry to leave him behind, but it looks like he's working with Esmeralda, and she's got to get away from the witch.

Reason's escape from Sydney doesn't exactly go as planned. Instead of escaping with her mother and all of her supplies, Reason finds herself on a winter street in New York City, barefoot and with nothing, after stepping through Esmeralda's back door.

She doesn't know how she ended up there, but she's grateful to Jay-Tee, the teenage girl who rescued her from the freezing, alien streets. She thinks that Jay-Tee is just a friendly passerby...But could there be more to it than that? What is going on? How did Reason step through a door from Sydney to New York? That's just not possible. What secrets are being hidden from her?

MAGIC OR MADNESS is a wonderful novel from Justine Larbalestier, who's married to one of my favorite authors of all time, Scott Westerfeld. It's a fascinating story, and the way it's told is a little unconventional: some chapters are told in a first person point of view, in Reason's voice, and others are told in a third person limited point of view, from inside either Jay-Tee's or Tom's mind. These three different points of view could be confusing, but Justine Larbalestier pulls it off wonderfully.

The story itself is quite a page-turner. I read this book when it first came out, and reread it after getting my own copy in paperback, and I loved it both times. The characters are all wonderfully realistic and interesting. Each answer Reason finds only leads to more questions, keeping suspense throughout the story. The writing is fantastic, and I'm really looking forward to the third book in the trilogy, MAGIC'S CHILD, coming in 2007! show less

There are lots of books out there that deal with magic and madness and sometimes both of them together. What makes Larbalestier’s book so different are her characters. When I first started reading the book and “met” Reason for the first time, I thought her as very young and very naive. In fact, there was this sense of detachment when I looked at the world through her eyes. While the older me knew that much of what her mother had told her about her grandmother might have been untrue, I could not help but be swayed from this belief by the strength of Reason’s determination to believe in her mother. There’s Tom, who is so unlike all the heroes I’ve come across that I might have read the book for him alone. He thinks in fashion show more – his magic is fashion. Jay-Tee, whose better nature leads her to help Reason even though doing so would get her nothing but grief. And the creepiest villain so far – Mr. Blake. This is the first book so you don’t get much of a sense of the adults – Sarafina, Mere and Mr. Blake have been hued (deliberately) vaguely so the reader gets a sense of the person but not the person wholly. What I found most fascinating about this story is Reason herself. For instance, I am never quite sure how old she is. The sense I got initially was around twelve but she fibs that she’s fifteen and somehow the subject of age is never broached again. She doesn’t react in the typical ways – anger, fear – emotions for her are not solid colours but prismatic. JT thinks Reason is naive when she is anything but. She’s like an onion that you can peel to find continuous layers of – discover something different about. And the story – the promised thrill of magic is blanketed by the sobering fact that using magic has dire consequences just as not using it does. In fact, the entire story presents a morally gray area, letting the reader decide how to feel about whom without guiding them. And I appreciate the liberty to do. With Magic or Madness, Justine Larbalestier presents readers with a tale that allows them to feel the extremes of heat and cold, to both fear and cheer for the protagonists. She allows the reader to experience characters that are imbued with details and a rich complexity that lingers long after the last page has been turned. show less

I love the way Larbalestier turns what we know upside down. Reason has lived her life on the run from her evil grandmother. When she's 15, her mother ends up in a mental hospital and Reason has to go live with the woman she was raised to believe is a cruel monster. While she's plotting to run away, she befriends a neighbor boy and then discovers that her mother had been keeping some important facts about a family legacy secret. I finished this in one night because I couldn't stop reading, and immediately downloaded the second book in the series.

Magic or Madness was mediocre. It wasn’t terrible, but it was far from great either.

The best quality of the book is the magic system. Some people are born with the ability to use magic (it runs in families), but every time they use magic they shorten their life span, so most magic users die young – often around twenty. The catch? If you’re born with the ability to use magic and don’t, you’ll go mad.

It’s a wonderful conundrum that should have lead to a great book. Unfortunately, the heroine, Reason, doesn’t know magic is real and doesn’t find out about the predicament she’s in as someone born with the ability until pretty far into the book.

As a result, the idea gets little exploration. That likely changes in the latter show more books in the series, but Magic or Madness suffered from it.

Magic or Madness is about Reason Cansino, a girl who has spent her life wandering the Australian outback with her mother, Sarafina, hiding from her grandmother. Sarafina has always told Reason that her grandmother his dangerous – she’s a crazy, violent woman who believes that magic is real. When Sarafina suffers a mental breakdown, Reason is forced to move in with her grandmother, and she finds out that magic is real after all.

I should have liked Reason. She has admirable pluck and intelligence (I like how she’s so good with numbers), but she often came off as younger than her fifteen years. Possibly it was a combination of her upbringing and her complete lack of knowledge about her magical heritage, but she read as naive for most of the middle section of the book.

Another thing about Magic or Madness – it’s short. While it’s 304 pages, it’s a short 304 pages. I was able to start and finish it within a couple hours. While on one hand, I like being able to have a quick read, on the other I think the brevity characterized how some of the issues in the book weren’t deeply explored.

Overall, I probably won’t be reading any more of the series, but if I happen to run into the sequel at the library, I may pick it up.

Originally posted on The Illustrated Page. show less

From the Witchy Books Network review blog.

Reason Cansino, so named by her mother who wanted her life to be governed by nothing but logic, has grown up constantly moving around the Australian bush. Her mother ran away from home when she was 12 because, as she tells Reason, her mother is a terrible, evil person who "thinks" she is a witch. Unfortunately for Reason's mother, the book opens with her being committed to a mental hospital, and Reason being placed in the custody of her grandmother, Esmeralda.

Reason's fear and distrust of her grandmother is surprising to her new neighbor, Tom, who thinks that Esmeralda is the greatest person ever-- and small wonder, because she's been teaching him magic. But despite their diverging views on show more Esmeralda, the two teens find common ground when Tom reveals that his mother is in the mental hospital too. Reason puts her plans to run away on hold while Tom teaches Reason more about her family history and the secrets of her grandmother's house. Namely, the back door's portal to New York City...

The first in a trilogy, Magic or Madness is a new and unique take on how magic works, while also serving as a backdrop to the many culture clashes that occur in the story. The title refers to how in this world, something as powerful as magic takes its toll on the human mind-- an amazing idea that almost never gets explored in witchy fiction (yes, we all love karma and the Law of Three, but not all consequences are external!) I loved the way Larbalestier described Reason's upbringing from her own perspective-- as if there was nothing unusual about moving around every few months, not always knowing where you are going or where your next meal is coming from. Likewise, she presents very nuanced points of view between the different "factions" of characters: New Yorkers vs. Aussies, the pro-magic Tom and Jay-Tee vs. the anti-magic Reason-- even touching upon the subtle and not-so-subtle racism the half-Aborigine Reason faces in both countries.

This is the first book I've read (that I can remember) that presents magic as more of a problem than a power, and by the end you'll hope that they can find a way to get rid of their powers without losing their minds. I have every intention of reading the rest of this trilogy and strongly recommend it!

If you're not convinced you can read the first two chapters on Larbalestier's website! show less

A very strange, rich, confusing book. My view of who the villain was kept switching abruptly around - it was quite disconcerting. The obvious, cartoon villain was replaced by - lied to all her life? Then a whole new set of possible villains - who turned out to be one and a pawn...switch after switch. I wish we'd gotten more from Reason's POV after she went through the door, but I suspect that she really was nearly as bewildered as Jay-Tee thought. It's hard to upend an entire life's teachings - but she also got training in logic and reason, and when the facts contradict theory, facts win. She is, in many ways, very young - no "street-smarts", for either Sydney or New York. In other ways Reason is much closer to adult than either Tom or show more Jay-Tee - she's grown up being pretty much her mother's equal, not treated as a child. It's an interesting mix. One funny thing, for me - I had less trouble with the Australian slang than I did the New York variety (and there's no glossary for those!). It's most definitely the first of a series - the story ends at a turnpoint, not a conclusion (though without the feathers it would have been pretty solid). I'm interested enough I will probably seek out the other two, though it's not urgent. show less

Reason has lived a transient life with her mother, moving from town to town in the outback of Australia. All her life she and her mother have fled her grandmother, a woman who is evil, who believes that she can cast spells, who believes she is a witch. But Reason knows better, because her mother has taught her that magic is not real; there is no magic; her grandmother is not really a witch.

However, things change when her mother goes insane and Reason is sent to live with her grandmother in Sydney. Reason begins to question the things her mother taught her, especially when she steps through a door and finds herself suddenly in New York, and she is hit with the reality that magic is, in fact, real.

This book is wonderfully complex with no show more clear lines of what it means to be good or evil. The rules of magic are clear and precise and deadly, creating an already complicated world of traps and snares for the characters to maneuver through as they try to figure out who to trust and how to survive. Fabulous story, and I'm fascinated to see where the trilogy goes from here. show less