Magic Lessons and Magic's Child by Justine Larbalestier
I still don’t quite know what I make of the “(some) insanity is caused by people who have magic but don’t use it aspect of the series, but I am glad Larbalestier handled it pretty maturely.
Even though it technically adds to the squick level, I’m glad that the Reason/Danny sex was caused by Raul Cansino effectively giving them a magical roofie. I mean, on the one hand, it basically means that he raped both of them. On the other hand, it means that, under his own free will, the 18-year-old character we’re presumably meant to like did not have sex with his sister’s 15-year-old friend who he views as even younger, right after he gave off a long list of extremely good reasons that he shouldn’t without even getting to the “statutory rape” part. (And really 3 years isn’t a huge difference once the younger character is even 17 or 18, but at 15 and 18, it’s just kinda creepy.) Danny was still something of a douche about it (pre-ending) but it was far preferable to the alternative, and made sense for an essentially-nice 18-year-old playboy jock with his normal opinions of Reason. I wish Larbalestier had done a bit more with the difficulties of teen pregnancies, but I guess there wasn’t a lot of room for that, and, despite a lot of the subject matter, this is pretty much a “fluff” series.
On the flipside, Tom and Jay-Tee were extremely cute and charmingly functional for magic teens destined to either die young or become insane like their parents, even if Tom’s arc, though it made sense, made me somewhat lose patience with the character. (Also, given what we know about adults and magic children and the fact that he’s the only one who knows that Magic has magic, the ending had a slightly dark tone for me than may have been intended.)
I liked the focus on the nature of magic-even if I found Reason herself less interesting when she was becoming inhuman-and the way no one was innocent or completely good and/or right, but my favorite part was the way the magic users literally thought the way their magic worked. It feels like a bit of a let down, though, that aside from a few people, everything is the same as it always was for the magic users. I didn’t want or expect any sort or magic fixit, but it would have been nice if there was a way other people might be able to be saved in the future.