Changeling

Initial thoughts: “Molly Harper breaks away from her adult paranormal romance stories with this adorable young adult novel about witches and magic. Ms. Harper does away with her trademark snark in favor of teen angst, but she uses the angst to create a highly credible and relatable young woman who captures your attention and earns your respect. The setting is equally charming. With the typical boarding school antics as well as Victorian socio-economic differences, Ms. Harper builds a lot of tension and create ethical dilemmas for our heroine without delving into melodrama. All this to say that Changeling is simply adorable and refreshing in its simplicity. I did not want the story to end and am going to be impatiently waiting for the show more second story in the series!”

Now: Yes, Molly!!! I started Changeling with much trepidation. Change is scary, after all, and it is always a little nerve-wracking when a beloved author deviates from her preferred storytelling genres and tries something new. Thankfully, I lost all fear after the first chapter and quickly found myself engrossed in this utterly charming fish out of water story. The world-building is thorough, providing readers with a clear understanding of this alternate Victorian-era universe, its history, and the social and political highlights of the time, and Ms. Harper does all this without stultifying the story. Cassandra is endearing in her attempts to navigate the unfamiliar world of magical families and boarding school and quickly proves herself to be a heroine worth admiring. I so thoroughly enjoyed Changeling that it ruined my selection process for my next book to read because I wanted something that would make me feel as happy and light as Cassandra and her antics did. I love that Ms. Harper took a chance on YA, and I am even more in love with the product of that chance. show less

I bought this one night under the influence of sleeping medication, along with a slew of other Molly Harper titles, one of the rare examples of doing something under the influence that you don't regret the next morning.

Saying that, I didn't realise it was a YA novel until I started listening to it. I'd probably still have bought it, because Molly Harper, but there was a radical shift in expectations in the first 30 seconds.

This is an alternative England, in a world where people with magic took over the world, suppressing technology because they believed non-magical people would destroy the planet. Non-magical people, called snipes, are now the serving classes in a society that feels like a dystopian version of feudalism and an show more oligarchy. Magic families beget magical offspring, snipes beget ... more servants. Except Sarah's parents. She's a snipe and it turns out she has oodles of magic her parents have been trying to suppress so she isn't hauled off. Of course she's found out and this is the story of what happens after.

This is a sweet story, about magic and the power of friendship. It's also filled with snark, thank goodness, because sweet is generally not my thing. Reading it as an adult, there are small nit-pics I could make about the story logic, but they aren't generally the kind of thing pre-teens would notice. At least, pre-teen me wouldn't have. Pre-teen me would have been more enthralled with this book than adult-me was, and adult-me was sitting in my car on the street in front of my house for 15 minutes after work so I could keep on listening. That's a rarity for me, but Molly Harper just knows how to create a story book world that's easy for me to get caught up in, whether it's a YA or and Adult one.

Amanda Ronconi narrates this, as she does all of Harper's other books, but if I hadn't seen the credit on the cover, I'd not have believed it. The characters are English (and I think Sarah's/Cassandra's family is Irish?), and while my tin ear cannot say with any accuracy that she nailed the accents, she totally sold it to my ears - she sounded completely different; I only heard hints of anything recognisable when she was delivering the snarky lines.

Overall, an enjoyable story and entertaining audio. show less

Changeling checks so many boxes for me. Sure, there are a lot of tired tropes and predictable things, but the predictable things aren’t bothersome, and the tropes are my favorites.

The world of Changeling is one where there are magical beings the world, and back around the industrial revolution, those magical beings got tired of the non-magical guttersnipes – nicknamed “Snipes” – developing new technology tat may bypass their inherent power. Our story takes place two hundred years later, and follows Sarah, a Snipe who has magic. Chaos and coverups ensue.

In the early moments of the story, we already have a romantic interlude, and Sarah starts the story with an internal struggle – in this case, her health. Molly Harper does a show more great job of putting a lot of pressure on Sarah all the time. Whether it’s her own abilities (or lack thereof), a petty minor villain, or a malicious government, the protagonist doesn’t have a moment to rest. And even though Sarah falls into a “chosen one” trope, she does not have the usual Mary Sue abilities of many chosen ones. She can’t get by without help from her friends and families.

Changeling takes place mostly at a magical school, and as such, it invites comparisons to Harry Potter. That disappoints me, because it’s like we can never have magical boarding schools now because they’re all “copying Harry Potter”. I thought that this book was still creative, and I love boarding school stories. The world felt different enough from the Potterverse, and I really appreciated Harper’s easy inclusion of the deities of many mythologies (I caught goddesses from Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian mythology), and the artifacts added a fresh twist. I really like that blades were used in the place of wands. It’s something I’ve never seen before, but it makes a lot more sense to me. So, yeah, it’s a magical boarding school, and Sarah has a couple good friends. It didn’t feel like Harry Potter fan fiction to me.

One regret I have about my experience with Changeling is the fact that I listened to this as an audiobook. Narrators can make or break a book, and if I didn’t love so many aspects of the story, this narrator would have broken it for me. Her reading was slow, steady, and comes off as very sarcastic. I didn’t feel it matched Sarah’s character at all, who is a genuine, timid girl for most of the books. Sure, Sarah has her occasional snaps and snide remarks, but for the most part she’s sweet and nervous and frustrated and the voice just didn’t fit. The reading style wasn’t terrible, the accents were fine, but I felt like her delivery was a mismatch for the protagonist.

I really, really enjoyed this book. Even though the narrator’s pacing was slow, the story’s pacing was quick and kept me interested throughout. I liked Sarah as a protagonist and the various bad guys and villainous characters were wonderfully done (honestly, I can’t believe Mary!). The writing style was well-balanced and while there was a little bit of a world building info dump at the very beginning, it settled itself out after that initial introduction.

While Changeling is a little tropey, it has that warm comfortable buzz of old favorites like Harry Potter, Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic series, A Great and Terrible Beauty, and the Vampire Academy series. I will definitely be adding the next book to my TBR, because I had a delightful time with this one. I easily recommend it as a quick, easy read. It’s great for anyone who enjoys magic, boarding schools, rags-to-riches stories, found families, and the like. show less

Molly Harper's new series, "Sorcery and Society" goes in a completely new direction from her adult romcom romps about the vampires and werewolves of Half Moon Hollow, Kentucky.

"Changeling" is a Young Adult story, set in an alternative England, ruled by "Guardian" families with magical abilities who, shortly after the start of the Industrial Revolution, seized power in across the world in a coordinated coup called the Restoration. Over the generations that followed, the non-magical population, know as snipes (presumably from Guttersnipe), has been turned into a servant/serf class in a feudal system in which they are each owned by a Guardian Family.

Against this background, we follow the adventure of Sarah Smith, a fourteen-year-old snipe show more girl, as she discovers she has powers that should only be available to those with a Guardian bloodline, is taken away from her family, is renamed Cassandra Reed and sent to the elite school Miss Castwell’s Institute for the Magical Instruction of Young Ladies.

What follows is a wonderful bubble of Young Adult escapism dealing with all the usual conflicts between adolescents girls at school but amplified by Cassandra's need to keep her Sarah Smith identity secret, by the dark secrets that sit behind how the Guardian families maintain power and by a whole world of magic.

This is a feel-good book with a serious background. The characters have enough to depth to them to make them real rather than just plot devices. Sarah's Guardian sponsor, Mrs Winter, is fierce and resourceful. Sarah and her friends are likeable. The bad-but-popular girl is a bit a cypher but that makes it all the easier to hiss at her like a pantomime villain.

The plot has some surprises in it and the world-building is more complex than I'd expected. I was also pleased that, as this is a Young Adult book, we didn't have any of the obligatory let-me-tell-you-about-the-great-sex-we-had scenes that I find so tiresome in the Half Moon Hollow books.

What I enjoyed most about the book and what it most has in common with Molly Harper's other books, is the sassy humour, this time with a slightly drier, more English flavour to it, that defines the book's tone.

Amanda Ronconi, who narrates the Half Moon Hollow books so well, is also the narrator for "Changeling". I was unsure of this at first, given the variety of English accents the plot requires. Most of the posh English accents are close enough but the regional ones are a bit of a mishmash. The only glaring error was pronouncing "clerk" the way it's spelt rather than pronouncing it as if it were spelt clark, as any English person would.

Nevertheless, once my ear adjusted, I was very happy to be listening to Amanda Ronconi. Her comic timing is perfect and she gave the main characters distinct voices that fit well with their personalities. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of her performance.


https://soundcloud.com/audible/changeling show less

I greatly enjoyed it, the writing style is superb and the characters convincing. It caught my attention immediately, the main character is charming. Worldbuilding is crafty, and I have a soft spot for school and boarding school types of settings.

I can't rate higher since the pacing kept randomly lagging and losing my interest in parts. Easy writing style but not a quick read for me due to this.

Changeling by Molly Harper
1st book in the Sorcery and Society series. YA magic. Historical with a touch of steampunk.
Society is divided between the magic users as upper class and those without magic as the servant class. 14 year old Sarah has been sickly as long as she can remember until one day she saves a vase using magic. The family she works for forces Sarah into impersonating as a distant relative and she finds herself in a magic school she is ill-prepared for. Magic familiars, competitive classmates and a book that can’t be read are all part of the strange new world for Sarah.

Engaging and enthralling, I was hooked listening to the audio.
Now that Sarah, aka Cassandra has magic, she needs to figure out who she is inside. Nice? show more Snarky? A follower? Turns out she doesn’t want to be influenced by who can make her important.
Growing pains.
I really enjoyed this “coming of age” troupe paranormal and will read the second as soon as possible. show less

Sarah Smith has lived all of her fourteen years as a servant to the magical Winter family along with her parents and sister. She's been the sickly one, taking a daily pill, which leaves her weak. But she starts skipping the pills and learns that she has magic when she levitates a vase her employer particularly treasures.

With her secret out, her mistress Mrs. Winters decides to make use of Saran, now renamed Cassandra Reed, by sending her to the exclusive Miss Castwell's School for the Magical Instruction of Young Ladies.

Cassandra has a lot of trouble there. She's behind on her magical education; she attracts the attention of a group of mean girls. Then she opens a previously sealed magical book and becomes the focus of a lot of show more attention she'd rather avoid. She's also afraid that her real background will be discovered.

But Cassandra makes some friends and even attracts a boy or two and life gets good. Until the revenants start arriving.

This was a fun coming of age story with both magic and adventure. It is also the first book of a trilogy. I listened to the audiobook of this one and enjoyed the narration. show less