Unlike many orphan-fantasy tales, The Magician’s Daughter is not a chosen-one narrative. Rather, it follows a normal girl learning how to navigate a wide, complicated, and magical world, and sorting out how to love the complicated people who inhabit it. Or, in the words of her story, “She had seen the world, and the world needed magic. Whatever Rowan had lied about, knowingly, or otherwise, he was right about that. She knew that now, perhaps even more surely than he did, because she was precisely one of those ordinary human creatures who would never normally have known magic existed and yet missed it desperately.”

The Magician’s Daughter is many things: a coming-of-age story, a cozy British yarn, and an alternate history where magic is real.