Changeling (Sorcery and Society, #1)

by Molly Harper

[MurderByDeath]

I bought this one night under the influence of sleeping medication, along with a slew of other Molly Harper titles, one of the rare examples of doing something under the influence that you don't regret the next morning.   Saying that, I didn't realise it was a YA novel until I started listening to it.  I'd probably still have bought it, because Molly Harper, but there was a radical shift in expectations in the first 30 seconds.   This is an alternative England, in a world where people with magic took over the world, suppressing technology because they believed non-magical people would destroy the planet.  Non-magical people, called snipes, are now the serving classes in a society that feels like a dystopian version of feudalism and an oligarchy.  Magic families beget magical offspring, snipes beget ... more servants.  Except Sarah's parents.  She's a snipe and it turns out she has oodles of magic her parents have been trying to suppress so she isn't hauled off.  Of course she's found out and this is the story of what happens after.   This is a sweet story, about magic and the power of friendship.  It's also filled with snark, thank goodness, because sweet is generally not my thing.  Reading it as an adult, there are small nit-pics I could make about the story logic, but they aren't generally the kind of thing pre-teens would notice.  At least, pre-teen me wouldn't have.  Pre-teen me would have been more enthralled with this book than adult-me was, and adult-me was sitting in my car on the street in front of my house for 15 minutes after work so I could keep on listening.  That's a rarity for me, but Molly Harper just knows how to create a story book world that's easy for me to get caught up in, whether it's a YA or and Adult one.   Amanda Ronconi narrates this, as she does all of Harper's other books, but if I hadn't seen the credit on the cover, I'd not have believed it.  The characters are English (and I think Sarah's/Cassandra's family is Irish?), and while my tin ear cannot say with any accuracy that she nailed the accents, she totally sold it to my ears - she sounded completely different; I only heard hints of anything recognisable when she was delivering the snarky lines.   Overall, an enjoyable story and entertaining audio.