Genre: Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Grayson sneezed. This in itself is not unusual but it’s what happened next which freaked him out. A small pink elephant appeared.
Enter Penelope, a glamorous cottage witch with a drinking problem. She’s been sent to help Grayson master his new wizard powers. And she’s here to fix his sneezy magical mishaps.
Grayson has also fallen in love. His new boyfriend, Milo, is the best friend of bitchy social influencer, Summer. She doesn’t approve of their relationship and has video proof of one of Grayson’s mystical screw ups.
With the threat of being exposed, Grayson soon learns he’ll need more than magic to keep him out of trouble.
The Review
It had been a while since I’d read one of Kevin Klehr’s books. It took a minute, but then Klehr’s signature style really began to register, and I found myself quite at home.
Grayson has just discovered that he has magical powers; but not in a good way. He sneezes and a tiny pink elephant appears. The elephant’s name is Hugo. In this author’s comic/surreal world, magic manifests at different times in some young people’s lives, and at first there is no controlling it. The comic aspect of this book is based largely on Grayson’s inability to make his new-found magic function appropriately.
Fortunately, Grayson has a sort of mentor witch, a somewhat older woman by the name of Penelope Worthington. Penelope has been tasked with watching over Grayson and helping him settle into his magic. She’s very gifted with food magic (she’s a cottage witch) and excellent at conjuring up cocktails. She is also drunk a great deal of the time, which can be a problem in a mentor.
Meanwhile a handsome young internet influencer named Milo is hanging out with his super-famous influencer friend Summer. He runs into Grayson (literally) while shopping for photogenic coffee beans to help her brand. There’s instantly something there, and that’s the romantic through-line in this comedy of magical errors.
As Grayson tries, with Penelope’s sometimes-ineffectual help, to manage his magic, he also tentatively starts a sort of flirtation with Milo. We discover that both Penelope and Grayson have mommy issues, and Milo will develop his own problems along the way—due to Grayson’s mismanagement of his powers.
It all feels very contemporary and young, while simultaneously awkward and sort of adorable. Klehr’s distinctive narrative style carries the story and the characters along.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
