Wandmaking 101 – David Hochhalter (David Hochhalter & Tom Crepeau)

This looks like a children’s book. “Sunshine Mystery Magic Club” just screams that it’ll be terminally cutesy. The cover art (young girls, carrying stylized, possibly-magical implements, walking through a forest) reinforces the expectation. In fact, this adult reader read it with pleasure.

Wandmaking 101 does have some of the characteristics of juvenile fiction. The protagonists are young, and the ethical challenges they face are appropriate for their ages. Less-typically for juvenile fiction, their story is firmly embedded within a larger world.

The year is 1963, and the Confederacy (it seems to have broken from England successfully in the nineteenth century) is in contact with Avalon - a world of effective magic and less-effective technology. They are on good terms, because forces from Earth helped save Avalon from an invasion (from yet another world) a few years earlier, but the connection is still tentative. When three girls at a middle-school “magic club” manage to actually create a wand, their success turns out to have world-shaking implications.

A lot of story is crammed into five-hundred-odd pages - and I didn’t notice until it was pointed out in passing, but the entire story takes place over a few hours.