As the reviews I read were mixed on this one it took me a long time to figure out if I wanted to read it. Then I discovered that this is a book about books and of course I had to read it.

I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

But... Magical Realism is not my genre, most books from the genre that I attempted ended up on my DNF shelf. And the plot starts slow and is next to non-existent, it is just diary entries from the teenage protagonist, Mori. And she is weird.

You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.

Mori is Welsh, sees elves and dabbles in magic. After some spectacular, magical incident that cripples her and kills her twin sister Mor, she flees from her abusive mother and the reader gets to follow her to her new boarding school where she is an outsider from the start. Mori spends all her spare time reading SFF books and the name-dropping builds up a crazy reading list of classics up to 1980 (most of the story takes place in 1979).

...what I did was dangerous, trying for a karass. Maybe I shouldn’t have extended it beyond the protection, which I really needed to do. Doing magic for things you want yourself isn’t safe. Glorfindel told me that. Most of what I want I can’t have for years, if at all. I know that. But a karass shouldn’t be impossible, should it? Or too dangerous to try for? Of course, it’s impossible to know whether it worked. That’s always the problem with magic. One of the problems. Among the problems...

And then she finds a SFF book club at the local library, makes friends, and somehow I got drawn in. Somewhere around the two thirds mark I started rooting for Mori to get her act together.

Was the book group, and SF fandom, there all the time, or did it all come into being when I did that magic, to give me a karass? Was there Ansible? I know they think there was, that there were conventions going back to 1939, and certainly science fiction was there all the time. There’s no proving anything once magic gets involved.