Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

I picked up Sorcerer to the Crown more or less at random - I'm sure it was on one of my lists, but I can't remember which one. As it was by a new author, I didn't know what to expect. I was very pleasantly surprised. This was thoroughly delightful. I don't necessarily feel knocked off my feet, but I do feel happily transported to a world that is both familiar and strange - and when we're talking about historical fantasy, that is no mean trick.

What we have here is a look at Victorian England, with its racialized and gendered ideology of natural social hierarchy intact, but with magic. White men have held the power in magic in England for a long time, just as they have in politics. Women's magic they dismissed as trivial (for household things) or dangerous (too difficult for their frail forms.) Magic done by people of other races? Simply impossible to think of - or at least it was until the Sorcerer to the Crown took on an apprentice, a young black man.  Even more shocking came the day when the Sorcerer died, and the young man, Zacharias, took on the staff and office of his mentor.

Undeniably magical, Zacharias is nonetheless regarded with suspicion. How dare he be Sorcerer Royal? Isn't there something unseemly about that? And how did his former master die, anyway? And why has magic in England been drying up? These things are all undoubtedly connected, or so the gossip mill runs. And they are, but not in the way the white men in the book quite think they are.

Into this mix comes Prunella, who attended a girls' school for magic - well, scratch that. A Girls School for Restraining Magick, would be more accurate. She's very good at it, but also not white, and without family, so now she is more of a servant than anything else. She thinks of herself as a trusted friend and confidante of the headmistress, and is brought up short when she more or less gets sent to the scullery when Zacharias pays a visit, and Prunella magically separates two girls who are fighting, thus embarrassing the school.

Outraged, she collects her late father's effects and leaves, discovering in the process that the seven stones he left her are actually familiar eggs - more precious than anything in magic-starved Britain.  Meanwhile, Zacharias suffers both from nightly attacks of weakness that are not immediately explained, and from assassination attempts from those who hate him having his position.

Of course, England cannot be merely insular. They are also intruding themselves into the internal affairs of another nation without properly examining the context, more than willing to believe the male leader that the women on his island are evil witches who should be controlled by their rightful patriarch. Zacharias is uncomfortable with this, but not as uncomfortable as everyone is when the leader of the "witches" shows up and wreaks havoc, for better reason, but with no more real understanding of the internal politics of England than the English have of her island.

I found this book particularly delightful, particularly Zacharias' friend with the unexpected familiar, and other shenanigans about a familiar Zacharias' rival as Sorcerer Royal might have brought back in an *ahem* untraditional manner. I can't say it was deep, but Cho's got an excellent knack for melding Victorian identity politics with the idea of magic and familiars and Fairyland, and I was quite satisfied by the whole lot.