Our Dark Incantations never caught me. I liked the idea of a magical battle of wills, but the world building never compelled me enough to understand the stakes. Keep reading this book review of Our Dark Incantations for my full thoughts.
Summary
After the war, ex-healer Mira Winters swore she’d never touch magic again. And yet here she is attending the newly reopened Ivercrest University, enrolled in the wrong magic department, paired up with the absolute wrong partner—the infuriating Aidric Dawson.
Instead of learning how to make a potion strong enough to heal her incurable scar, Mira attends demonology lessons, casts deadly spells…and is accidentally dragged into a murder investigation on campus—one with devastating ripples that bleed into the magical world far beyond the university.
Even more devastating? Aidric Dawson. Rumored to have been a high-ranking soldier during the war, the lethal Wielder is arrogant, aristocratic, and shrouded in secrets…but with his own wounds from the war, he may also be the only one who truly understands Mira.
A labyrinth of clues pulls Mira and Aidric deep into a sinister plot hiding in the shadows of magical society, threatening war once more. Can the two enemies work together without losing their hearts—or their lives—in the process?
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Our Dark Incantations is an enemies to lovers story about the price of magic. But the world building from the beginning felt fuzzy to me as the war and what happened was slow to unfurl. Part of the compulsion to keep reading comes from the past having been so impactful and how it has solidified this schism in magic in the idea of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ magic. But I never felt this power as the entire history of the war and what happened to them during, felt fuzzy. It seemed like such a big part of why we were supposed to empathize for her, the difficulty of embracing this magic, but besides the theoretical, I never felt the true stakes.
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And a fantasy without stakes, especially with this stark beginning of the idea of firm good and bad, felt one dimensional. Annoyingly, I felt like it had a purpose, but while reading I never was able to fill in the missing pieces. Our Dark Incantations begins to ask questions about morality and war, especially as we try to continue in the ashes, but without the context from earlier on, I had difficulty feeling the depth. Find Our Dark Incantations on Goodreads, Storygraph, Blackwells, Bookshop. org & Libro. fm.