Title When We Were Magic Series --- Author Sarah Gailey Cover Art --- Publisher Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers - 2020 First Printing Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers - 2020 Category Young Adult Warnings None Main Characters Alexis, Roya...and I already can't remember the rest Main Elements Witches

Keeping your magic a secret is hard. Being in love with your best friend is harder.

Alexis has always been able to rely on two things: her best friends, and the magic powers they all share. Their secret is what brought them together, and their love for each other is unshakeable—even when that love is complicated. Complicated by problems like jealousy, or insecurity, or lust. Or love.

That unshakeable, complicated love is one of the only things that doesn't change on prom night.

When accidental magic goes sideways and a boy winds up dead, Alexis and her friends come together to try to right a terrible wrong. Their first attempt fails—and their second attempt fails even harder. Left with the remains of their failed spells and more consequences than anyone could have predicted, each of them must find a way to live with their part of the story.

Hmm. Ok, this was not a book meant for me, at least I read it for free on the rivetedlit.com website (free books available to read online each month) but I think this was one where even the time investment wasn't worth it. But like I said, that's me, the target audience might enjoy it more?

First problem, way too much angst. To be fair, the protagonist Alexis has just killed a boy by accidentally exploding his penis. This is no spoiler, this is the first page of the book. Thus it would be very weird if she wasn't freaking out about this and being hard on herself. And then her friends get involved to help her fix the mess, only succeeding in making things worse, so she had to deal with the guilt of getting her friends all mixed up in it. But it got super annoying after a while, and the fact that she is in love with one of her best friends, and EVERYONE knows it already, she has to angst over that too. I know, normal teenage stuff, but annoying.

It's bad enough when the girl moans the whole book about not being good enough for her cool boyfriend, but Alexis moans about not being good enough for ANYONE. *bangs head on desk* I just wanted the book to end already, I did want to find out what would happen, but the agony of getting there was worse than getting one's teeth pulled. The book would probably be 10 pages of actual plot, the rest is Alexis berating herself and getting her friends to yell at her for berating herself...endlessly...*some more head banging*

Second problem, believable worldbuilding. We have a small town, with six girls that find out that they can all do magic, each of them discovering their powers on their own and slowly finding each other, till we've got this group of closet BFF's with a big secret. But what is the chance of that? It is never explained. Why are the only people in this town with magic in the same year of high school? I can understand girls only, but what about mothers, aunts, grandmothers, younger sisters? Even just one grade younger/older? And why so many in such a small town? In fact keeping track of all six, a couple with similar names, made my head spin till I decided it wasn't important to keep them separate in my head, only two or three stand out, the rest are just distracting padding. Maybe with 4 leads it would work, 6 way too many and info about them has to be dumped on the reader since there isn't enough time to show instead of tell. On the positive side, the magic has limitations, they each have their own specialities, and using magic comes with consequences...like accidentally killing your one night prom fling. There is a price that had to be paid and this was the only grown up insightful part of this book for me.

Priorities sometimes seemed skewed too. Yes, I suppose if you secretly have magic and kill someone with it and you are trying to get rid of the evidence, you have to act like everything is normal to everyone else, like attending swim meets. But while I suppose the entire story takes place over the period of a week, it felt like it took them months to get around to doing what they had to do, since they had to keep angsting over regular teenage girl things too.

Freaking huge loopholes...ok tiny spoiler here (you learn this in the first chapter) but in the attempt to dispose of the body, they are left with a handful of body parts like arms, legs, organs, etc. Which they then need to proceed to dispose of again. But the arm is found by the police. Then at the end of the story, SPOILER - when his body is reformed he is missing an arm (remember, it's in the police evidence locker) and everyone seems surprised and shocked and confused...guess all that magic was messing with their short term memory too...it was only a few chapters back that the arm being found was a big deal, it was like the author, and editor, forgot. Not good.

It is LGBTQ themed, but I no longer call that out as a positive, why? Because it is about time it should be just a given, that we all read books all the time about straight/gay/transgender/etc and not think twice about it. And just because Alexis is moaning/angsting/whining/etc about her girlfriend instead of a boyfriend mattered not at all, it was an incredibly annoying turn off either way.

So other than an few acts beautiful magic, very little of the book was interesting or made sense. But I see a lot of people seemed to love it of Goodreads so, yep, maybe it just wasn't for me.