Rufus needs his student’s help to solve his parents' murder, and after a year of tuition, Laurence has run out of excuses to put off witnessing the gruesome secrets buried in the past. But his vision only raises more questions. The mystery isn’t how they died, but how Rufus survived.
The only clue is a teddy bear nobody remembers, and it holds magic powerful enough to hospitalize Freddy, entangle a god, and hide a murderer.
Learning magic doesn’t come cheap, and the bill is long overdue.
Maybe some secrets are better left buried.
CONTRIBUTOR(S): RJ Bayley (Narrator)
PUBLISHER: Ravensword Press
YEAR: 2022
LENGTH: 382 pages (11 hours 5 minutes)
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Romance
RECOMMENDED: Highly
Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Main Character(s), Bi/Pan Main Character(s), Ace/Aro Main Character(s).
As tense and hectic as SPELLS OF SUMEMR is, it feels like it might be the calm before an even greater storm. Laurence has two teachers, both of whom withhold information and neither of whom really know about the other. Except, it turns out they first met a long time ago, as Laurence discovers in a vision. Laurence has known since before Rufus became his teacher that eventually they’ll have a disagreement so huge that they will have to part ways. I won't spoil whether this is that disagreement, but Laurence's knowledge of this impending event and the tension that that engenders in his interactions with Rufus are present throughout the book.
SPELLS OF SUMMER doesn't completely wrap up anything that was left hanging from previous books. The inciting incident is Laurence's attempt to finally do what he promised Rufus he would: look into the past and find out how Rufus's parents died. Laurence has been putting it off because he didn't want more images of death and destruction in his mind, but he can't put it off any longer and continue to learn from Rufus without paying for it.
The audiobook narrator continues to do an excellent job! I like the accent work and all the voices for the different characters. They're distinctive without anyone being annoying.
What Laurence sees when he looks into the past spins out into something strange and dramatic, pulling in Freddy and Myriam alongside Laurence and Quentin as narrators. I’m not sure if there’s anything that is both introduced and resolved here, at least not in terms of a specific plot point. What this does very well is move several characters further on their emotional arcs. Laurence and Quentin now know how far Rufus is willing to go to get what he wants. Myriam and Freddy have to deal with the tension between them caused by Freddy's telepathic deception when he kidnapped Laurence several books ago. They haven’t been around each other since then, and while Laurence and Quentin have already had to process their reactions, Myriam has not yet had the opportunity for a confrontation.
So much of SPELLS OF SUMMER is about dealing with the past, sorting through prior events, and figuring out what the next steps ought to be. While, in a simplistic sense, the plot is coherent and well told enough for it to make sense for someone who tried to start here without having read any of the previous books, it would be a very dissatisfying experience. For anyone who did want to start the series midway through rather than going back to the beginning, they should start at RITES OF WINTER, which begins the second season.
The layers of worldbuilding have been slowly accumulating since the series began. Gradually increasing my understanding of a complex story world is one of my favorite parts of long-runing series. The newest distinct layer here is confirmation of other gods, other pantheons, and other afterlives for different believers. It also reinforces the idea that there are many different ways to go about magic, and which one someone uses is shaped by them as much as they are shaped by it.
SPELLS OF SUMMER is not the last book, and it establishes the probable identity of the warlock who has been pulling strings behind the scenes. He is definitely the person who has been teased in the epilogues of the last several books, but the main cast don't know any of those particulars yet. It establishes that future books will almost definitely require some more direct, confrontation, laying the groundwork for the finale this season in the series. It does make me wonder whether all the major villains will be warlocks, though two is hardly a large enough sample size for meaningful conjecture. However things end up, I'm eager for the next book!
Graphic/Explicit CW for memory loss.
Moderate CW for sexual content, panic attacks, blood, violence, medical content, medical trauma, murder, death.
Minor CW for grief, ableist language, disordered eating, child abuse, torture, kidnapping, injury detail, confinement, parental death.
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