Despite his deeds, I can’t help but love Errol. While I love a villain you can unabashedly cheer against he’s a sympathetic character and I immensely appreciate that we get chapters from him. His desperation and the fear he feels are so well drawn. He’s by far some of the best character work in the series yet. But he isn’t the only improvement in that regard. Alyssa and her godfather, Alex, have some lovely moments together. This is likely because as a sequel it doesn’t need to dedicate as much time to setting up the world but it’s great to see nonetheless. 

I do miss her friends from the first book though. She has new friends now and I did come to like them. I was a little disappointed by the lack of the girls from the first book but ultimately it’s for the best. 

The premise is interesting. Alyssa is much more involved in the plot this time around, and actively making decisions. And I do not understand them. Not only hers either. We’ve known for so long that magic should be kept secret despite all of the blabbing she did. It’s worse than ever here. Her godfather forces her to admit magic in front of his partygoers. But she herself is so blasé about telling everyone and risks endangering the people around her happily. There are not-infrequent mentions of the magic police and given all the spying on people that goes on in these books I’m genuinely surprised that she hasn’t been thrown in jail yet because it’s so brazen from so early on. There’s still so much talk of bureaucracy that it feels like the world building can’t really be trusted. 

A Curse of Mayhem leans much more into the mundane here. There’s no great adventure section and I do think it’s the stronger for it. This isn’t that kind of book but it frustrating then that it waffles between its own stakes. I get why Alyssa was torn between caution and spending time with her friends but for her godfather to put his foot down because of her inability to control her powers, and once she loses control again – proving his fears true – suddenly caves and let her do what she wants…. 

I’ll fully admit that I’m too chronically ill to take the justifications and choices of its characters seriously. The reckless endangerment of her classmates and her forced attendance just seem contrived to me. But I do know that attendance to the detriment of children is something that people will do. I just couldn’t take it seriously. 

As an exploration of growth through a fantasy concept, I think this book is good. It’s much more focused on what it wants to say and happen than the first – much as I liked the wildness of its magic’s permutations. The emotions of its characters really shine in places and make it a stronger and better book overall. Not only that but the prose flows much more naturalistically and some characters I could differentiate purely by the way they spoke. It wrapped up pretty neatly so I am intrigued by there being a third book at all but I look forward to it. 

Thanks to iReadBookTours and Sunayna Prasad. I leave this review voluntarily.