Ordinary Magic sort of takes the Harry Potter world of Muggles, the ordinary people who make the world work, and Wizards, the special magical people who get to go to Hogwarts for special training and for their own protection, and turns it upside-down. In Abigail Hale’s world, everybody has magical abilities, well, almost everybody, It’s not usually a question of whether you’re magical or not, only how gifted you are. Abigail’s older sister Alexa is a Nine. (Tens are quite rare.) So when Abigail goes for her Judging on her thirteenth birthday, she’s hoping to test out at least a Six level. Instead, she and her loving family (two brothers, two sisters, Abigail is the youngest) receive the devastating news that Abby is an Ord, ordinary, no magical ability at all.

“There are few options available to the families of ords. It is a shame there are so few, but it’s not as if it can be changed. . . I sympathize with the frustration you must be feeling. The tragedy of realizing that one of your own is . . .” He sighed. “This must be very hard. I understand that many families experience difficulty in deciding what to do. I believe a few occasionally decide to keep their . . their. . . ”
“Children,” Mom cut in.

Abby’s family is large and loving, one of the first things I noticed that I liked about this book. Abby meets other ord children who do not have such great families, but she is lucky to have a family that believes in her, works to provide the best opportunities for her, and loves her, even though she is an Ord, non-magical, a practical pariah in normal (magic-permeated) society.

I have to say here that I am about to decide that our society is made of two kinds of people: not Ords and Magicals, but Creatives and Non-creatives. I look at books like this one and several others that I’ve read recently, and I’m amazed. How do authors think of such entertaining and ingenious plots and characters and worlds of imagination? I mean, OK, I do have a semi-original idea every once in while, but then some of those same imaginative people who have a stray idea actually carry it through to a finished project, in this case a whole book (soon to be a series). And it works, and I enjoy, and then I read another book in which a completely different person has taken a completely different idea and turned that seed into yet another real-life product. And I am again grateful to God for the gifts and ideas and talents and vision He has given each of us, especially those “creatives” who bring so much joy to me in the books they write or the other works of art they produce.

So, back to Ordinary Magic. I liked the premise; I liked the book. It might get old and repetitious as a series, but then again, maybe not. Ordinary Magic is eligible to be nominated for a Cybils Award in the category of Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nominations are open October 1-15, 2012.

I think this rather dark fantasy about a witch, three children, and some marionettes is my favorite of all Ms. Schlitz’s books that I’ve read. I like the fact that her books are all different from each other and that they all stand alone. A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, the book that won the Cybils Award for Middle Grade Fiction in 2007, was historical melodrama, set in the New England in the early twentieth century, with some historical characters and (fake) seances thrown into the mix. Her Newbery award-winning book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, is a series of 22 monologues told from the point of view of 22 different medieval characters who live in a typical village. The Night Fairy is more of a fairy tale for younger children, those who are just entering the chapter book reading phase.

And now we have Splendors and Glooms, Ms. Schlitz’s latest offering, set in Victorian England, which tells the story of two orphan children who are under the care and domination of an Italian puppet-master named Grisini. Grisini is appropriately greasy and nasty and villainous. Cassandra, the witch of the tale, appropriately lives in a sort of castle with a tower, and she’s, of course, clairvoyant and insane, just like the mythological Cassandra. The orphans, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall seem like typical Victorian street urchins at first, but each one is much more complicated and multifaceted than the typical Oliver Twist character in a Victorian novel. Lizzie Rose is a good girl, motherly and always seeing the best in people, but she manages to lead Parsefall and their friend into danger and still remain strong and compassionate to the end. Parsefall is the Artful Dodger of the piece, but he has a secret wound and turns out to be a true knight who saves the “princess” from death.

The final major character in this ensemble cast is Clara Wintermere, who is the only child from her rich family to survive a cholera epidemic that killed her five siblings when she was only five years old. Clara’s been living in the shadow of those siblings, called the “deaders” by Parsefall, ever since. Clara is the Poor Little Rich Girl who’s so protected and spoiled that she has only a hint of a personality in the beginning of the book, but it is Clara who manages to defeat the witch and her magic and free the children from Cassandra’s evil spells.

The title comes from the poem Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, canto 13, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I’ll leave you with the section of the poem that’s printed in the beginning of the book because it sums up the atmosphere of this brooding and haunting novel that turns out to be a rather down-to-earth story of the rescue and redemption of three children and a witch:

And others came . . . Desires and Adorations,
Wingèd Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp;–the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

Splendors and Glooms is eligible to be nominated for a Cybils Award in the category of Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nominations are open October 1-15, 2012.