But entering the magic world and reuniting with her sister after years of willful separation is not easy. When a faculty member there is brutally murdered by impossible magic, Ivy is hired to find out what happened and who the killer is. Her twin sister Tabitha, though, is magic and teaches at the Osthorne Academy of Young Mages.

There’s nothing magical about her life, and Ivy is fine with that. She lives a normal life as a private investigator, spending her days taking incriminating photographs of cheating husbands and arguing over payments from devastated clients. But then I read Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey and found an entertaining balance between the two. For a while, those two options seemed like the only ones: wondrous possibilities or fatal chaos.

(Okay, fine! I still think about it sometimes.) But then another, more cynical part of me thinks that magic school sounds like a terrible idea: thousands of teenagers all crowded together doing teenager things except with potentially out of control and deadly magic? No thank you. I admit it: I spent the vast majority of my childhood and adolescence wondering what it would be like to go to magic school.

Magic for liars by sarah gailey