INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE

Two half sisters work to protect their dead father’s collection of magical books in Törzs’ bewitching debut.

Esther and Joanna Kalotay are keepers of an impossible secret: that magic exists, and it's channeled through certain enchanted books. Esther and Joanna’s father, Abe, is fanatical about his collection of these books, but despite having devoted his life to magic, he's never been able to figure out how they were written. One terrible day, he tries to enact a spell from a mysterious book and is killed. This tragedy leaves Joanna, who shares her father’s ability to sense magic humming in a book, to tend to the library. Before he died, Abe had warned Esther, who is mysteriously immune to all magic, that she must take care never to stay anywhere for longer than a year, always leaving on Nov. 2, or she will risk being hunted down and killed by the same people who murdered her mother. Only once did Esther test this rule, and after barely escaping a strange man bent on killing her in her bedroom, she’s careful not to put down roots. But when Esther’s travels take her to a science station on Antarctica, she discovers that someone who knows about magic has finally found her, and her only chance to save herself is to trust a stranger who sent her a note and a plane ticket through an enchanted mirror. When Esther uses that ticket, she soon meets more people who know about magic and is forced to decide whom she can trust as she tries to discover why someone wants her dead. Törzs’ simple magic system of books is straightforward, with clear rules set out for readers early on, leaving her plenty of space to explore how an obsession with power can twist people so deeply that they betray the ones they love. Esther and Joanna’s complicated but loving relationship is wonderfully rendered, and Törzs pulls off such an expert series of twists that readers would be advised to cancel their plans until they get to the end.

A fantastic magical adventure, not to be missed.