There might be a little too much magic for some people in Leslie Rene’s debut novel, Maggie & Arthur’s Magic Moment. it’s a romantasy with an emphasis on the magic elements. However, I enjoyed the magical world the author created.
Dr. Maggie Linden is a Linguistics and Incantation Translation professor at Hawthorn College. She’s been there for four years, and the latest spring semester is almost over. Maggie’s best friend, Dahlia, is always up for a good time, and convinces Maggie to enjoy the Beltane celebration, a masked event with hints of magic. The magic in the masks is enough that Maggie doesn’t know who the man is that she kissed on the beach that night.
However, Maggie doesn’t have time to track him down before a magical lesson goes awry on campus. When a strong odor of magic gone wrong, sulfur and burnt ether, starts to leak through the building, Maggie and Dahlia help their students evacuate. Maggie returns to find Dr. Arthur Taliesin, the lead alchemist and campus rock star, evacuating the third floor lab where the experiment went wrong. Although they try to seal the classroom, a pall starts to spread. A pall, a rip in the fabric that separates this world from the next, will attract wraiths and ghouls and other strange creatures to the campus. and the surrounding community.
With the entire third floor and some classrooms unusable for the rest of the school year, professors are forced to share office space. Maggie is furious that her new officemate is Dr. Taliesin. She sees him as rude, arrogant, and convinced of his own importance. But, the dean is also convinced of Taliesin’s importance, and he warns Maggie to play nice. Maggie’s way of playing nice in order to get rid of her new officemate is to offer to assist Dr. Taliesin in getting rid of the magic pall. But, can she rid the magic pull she seems to have for Arthur Taliesin?
I enjoyed the campus and community Rene created in her debut. I liked Arthur more than Maggie did in the beginning. Maggie drove me nuts at times, though, in this enemies to lovers romance. She’s thirty-three, and she just can’t let go of a failed romance from her grad school years and the way her lover treated her. The enemies part of the trope is entirely on Maggie’s side because she can’t forget a man who hurt her. Actually, Maggie’s problem is she can’t forgive herself, so she can’t move on. Maggie & Arthur’s Magic Moment is a fun romance if you can deal with Maggie.
Leslie Rene’s website is https://byleslierene.com/
Maggie & Arthur’s Magic Moment by Leslie Rene. Ace, 2026. 432p.
FTC Full Disclosure – I received a galley from the publisher, through NetGalley, with no expectation of a positive review.
