Sorcery and the Single Girl

Mindy Klasky's new book is the second one in the trilogy that began with The Girl's Guide to Witchcraft. This series of tales is about Jane Madison, a librarian in Washington, D.C., who finds out she has magical powers. I "met" Mindy online through her blog, and I also interviewed her in this month's issue of the TPL Magazine. She's a delight, and her books reflect her personality, although it's clear that Jane Madison and Mindy Klasky are two different people! Although this book is close to four hundred pages, the prose zips along, and before I knew it, I was done. Based on what had happened in the previous book, I had an idea of what was going to happen at the end, and I have my guesses about what will happen in the third book. But even if I could predict it ahead of time, the ending was satisfying, and the plot wraps itself up nicely.

Jane is a great character as well, and since she's a librarian, I can identify with her. "I'd learned to judge a lot about people by the way they responded to my job title," she tells us. "About fifty percent made Marian the Librarian jokes, apparently deluded into believing that they were the first people in the history of librarianship to make The Music Man connection. Another twenty-five percent immediately asked how long it had taken me to learn the Dewey Decimal System. I no longer had a civil answer for either group." Well put, Jane!