Uncommon Charm

It’s not often that a gothic novella might be described as sweet, but Bergslien and Weaver bring such levity and humanity to their 1920s London-set debut that the word is only fitting. It kicks off when Simon Wolf comes to stay with a distant cousin—the narrator, endearingly overconfident 16-year-old socialite Julia Selwyn-Stirling—and her powerful magician mother, Lady Aloysia, to learn to control his own erratic magic, which has him seeing ghosts and occasionally accidentally breaking the laws of physics. The illegitimate Jewish son of an exiled Russian prince, a man Julia affectionately refers to as Uncle Vee, shy Simon’s out of place in Julia’s aristocratic world—and she takes an instant shine to him. Their friendship forms the core of the story as together they uncover secrets about Aloysia’s past with the lecherous Uncle Vee that are just dark enough to justify the gothic atmosphere without making the story’s light humor feel tone-deaf. The indomitable Julia is an ideal window into both this world’s magic and its dark underbelly, and the story is, in many ways, her coming of age, as family members are knocked from pedestals and she learns to have hard conversations with her mother. The result is a charming spin on favorite gothic tropes. (May)