Sixteen year old Anna lives in London with her aunt, and has grown up hearing about the dangers of magic. Nothing – and no one – could change her mind before then.

Only one more year and she will be free of the curse of magic, her aunt’s teachings and the disappointment of the little she is capable of. She will join her aunt alongside the other Binders who believe magic is a sin not to be used, but denied. It’s why she has been protected from the magical world and, in one year’s time, what little magic she has will be bound. It was, after all, magic that killed her parents and left her in her aunt’s care. She has taught her to fear how it twists and knots and turns into something dark and deadly. It must be bound.Įver since Anna can remember, her aunt has warned her of the dangers of magic. Synopsis: Within the boroughs of London, nestled among its streets, hides another city, filled with magic. (Feb.Published: May 27th, 2021 (Harper Collins) Readers will hope she finds surer footing in the next installment. Still, Thomas’s dark supernatural teen drama has promise. It will successfully get readers invested in book two, but at a steep cost to the present volume. The ending is especially frustrating, leaving so many mysteries unsolved that it reads less like a cliffhanger and more like Thomas just stopped writing. While the different types of witchcraft are fascinating, the prose is uneven, and the plot drags in the school sections.

The coven fractures, however, when a curse against the school’s mean-girl clique goes too far, and secrets from Anna’s and Effie’s pasts threaten their futures. But when new-girl-at-school Effie invites Anna to join her coven, social “nobody” Anna can’t resist having friends for the first time. Vivienne, who believes magic is sinful, wants Anna to become a Binder like her, a witch who ties up her magic in a knotted cord that will strangle the wearer if she tries to use it. Anna Everdell, 16, has lived with her abusive aunt Vivienne ever since her father killed her mother and then himself in a crime of passion. The Craft gets a Gen Z update in Thomas’s uneven contemporary fantasy debut, the first in the Language of Magic series.

Threadneedle novel