a kind of magic book review

A Kind of Magic book review: Anna Spargo-Ryan’s powerful memoir on living with complex mental illness

A KIND OF MAGIC

Anna Spargo-Ryan (Ultimo, $36.99)

At the beginning of A Kind of Magic, we find Anna Spargo-Ryan nervously visiting a new psychologist, a woman who is “a specialist in anxiety and psychosis”. “I am also a specialist in anxiety and psychosis,” Spargo-Ryan adds, “but in the other way, where they sometimes try to kill me.” It’s a moment that captures not only a complicated mix of feelings at a vulnerable moment, but also the combination of humour and honesty that characterises the award-winning Melbourne-based author’s powerful memoir about living with complex mental illness.

One of the book’s key interests is memory: its mutability and fallibility, and its importance to our sense of identity. This informs the memoir’s non-linear structure, which interweaves chapters concerning more recent events, written in the present tense, with a past-tense narrative that dips into memories including Spargo-Ryan’s intensely anxious childhood, her terrifying early experiences of psychosis, and the mental-health struggles that accompanied becoming a young mother.

Along the way, Spargo-Ryan — who is known for her novels The Gulf and The Paper House, as well as her non-fiction writing — delves into relevant scientific research while also endeavouring to situate her experiences within the context of a culture and medical system often ill-equipped to help or understand people grappling with their mental health. This might sound like a lot of ground to cover, and A Kind of Magic is certainly ambitious in this regard, but Spargo-Ryan synthesises it all admirably.

This might also sound rather harrowing, and certainly there are moments that can make for difficult reading, perhaps particularly for those of us who share some of the author’s diagnoses. But there’s also much here that is beautiful, moving and even optimistic, including the way Spargo-Ryan says she has, in writing this book, “taken my self-narrative from before and shaped it into a new way of looking at myself. I’ve remembered some things, and forgotten others. I am a more peaceful person than I was when I started.”

THE GHOST OF GRACIE FLYNN

Joanna Morrison (Fremantle Press, $32.99)

Fellow scaredy-cats need not be frightened off by Perth author Joanna Morrison’s Hungerford-shortlisted debut novel, whose titular ghost is less a spooky apparition than a poignant all-seeing narrator. It’s told from the perspective of Gracie, a young woman who watches over her close university friends Sam, Robyn and Cohen some 18 years after her death as they continue to be haunted by grief, despite having gone on to live ostensibly successful lives. The novel begins with a second death — that of Sam — with the mystery of his and Gracie’s demises unfolding as the story roams back and forth between the friends’ student days and the more recent past.

THOSE DASHING MCDONAGH SISTERS

Mandy Sayer (NewSouth, $39.99)

Sisters Isabel, Phyllis and Paulette McDonagh were born in quick succession between 1899 and 1901: fortuitously, as Mandy Sayer notes, entering “the world at the same time as motion pictures were entering the Australian experience”. Indeed, the trio would become pioneers of Australian cinema, making four feature films and a series of documentaries, with Paulette becoming one of only five female directors in the world at the time — and yet, Sayer says, they’re now better remembered in the UK than in their own country. Her deeply researched biography explores their remarkable professional and personal lives, aiming to “rescue these dashing sisters from their omission from our national and cinematic history”.

LESS IS LOST

Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown, $29.99)

There are shades of David Sedaris to this follow-up to Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Less, whose fans will be delighted to see his protagonist — self-described “middle-aged gay white novelist nobody’s ever heard of” Arthur Less — return for another charming and witty literary outing. It sees Less enjoying some professional success, as well as “unmarital bliss” with partner (and the novel’s narrator) Freddy Pelu, before the death of his former lover precipitates a financial crisis that threatens his and Freddy’s home. Less thus finds himself on the move in the face of his problems once again, travelling across the US through the “Mild Mild West”, the South and beyond.

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Book review: A Kind of Magic, Anna Spargo-Ryan

Writing and Publishing

‘Exquisitely honest, A Kind of Magic is an unforgettable example of empowerment via the gradual restructuring of narrative identity. Photo supplied,

Anna Spargo-Ryan’s illuminative memoir asks – and answers – psychological and philosophical questions about identity, narrative, and existence while engaging in the deeply subjective task of writing purely from memory. Beginning with self-aware perfectionism and the need to be seen as both good-and-bad enough, Spargo-Ryan invites readers into her consciousness with evocative ease. A Kind of Magic explores how our narrative identities are shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves, and the value judgments we attach to these stories. 

Interspersed with touching familial anecdotes, this perceptive read highlights situational absurdity to great comedic effect, without inadvertently invalidating the seriousness of the subject matter. This book is funny in the same way as asking someone to travel hundreds of kilometres to speak at an agoraphobia conference is funny. However, it is also vulnerable, authentic, and contemplative, asking questions like; is the fear of abandonment ever justified? What is the relationship between caregiver neglect and self-belief? How do the plot twists of our lives impact our narrative identities? 

Chapter titles alternate between aspects of mental health (past tense narrative) and months of the year (present tense) culminating in the inevitable meeting of timelines. One chapter entitled ‘The process of retaining information over time’ is concerned with the fallibility of childhood memory, and the link between mental time travel and fear in the context of mental illness.

Another chapter, ‘May’, features an adult Spargo-Ryan, examining her enmeshment schema and underdeveloped sense of self. Some chapters centre around wanting one’s children to be safe and happy, and trying-not-to-look-scary in the midst of a full blown panic attack. Others touch upon existential dread, encroaching agoraphobia, and a thousand varieties of fear. ‘A mood disorder associated with childbirth’ outlines the medical gaslighting of women in labour and ‘Having the qualities of being a mother’ exposes the echoes of an ancestral curse repeated across the lives of the author’s now-teenaged daughters.

Ruminating on the ancestral origins of her mental illness, Spargo-Ryan speaks of how disruption to the continuity of memory results in disruption to the continuity of identity, delving into her lived experience of mental illness with humour, sensitivity, and clarity. Describing the complex in simple terms, she comments on the brokenness of Australia’s mental health system, while emphasising the gendered mislabelling of behaviours and the growing field of research surrounding neurodiversity. She also touches upon the dehumanising stigma that comes with certain diagnoses, and the contradictory importance/futility of applying labels to human beings.

Spargo-Ryan’s personal experience demonstrates both the power of developing an accurate mental health vocabulary and the pitfalls of asking uninformed medical professionals for help they don’t know how to give. 

Read: Exhibition review: In Our Time and Treasures of Dai Gum San

Exquisitely honest, A Kind of Magic is an unforgettable example of empowerment via the gradual restructuring of narrative identity. The author captures what it feels like to frantically grasp at the threads of oneself, taking her readers on an optimistic journey of radical self-creation. This book will resonate with magical thinkers, armchair psychologists, and people whose timelines unglue themselves.

A Kind of Magic by Anna Spargo-Ryan Publisher: Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761150739 Format: Paperback Pages: 352 pp Release Date: 5 October 2022 RRP: $36.99

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Nanci Nott is a nerdy creative with particular passions for philosophy and the arts. She has completed a BA in Philosophy, and postgraduate studies in digital and social media. Nanci is currently undertaking an MA in Creative Writing, and is working on a variety of projects ranging from novels to video games. Nanci loves reviewing books, exhibitions, and performances for ArtsHub, and is creative director at Defy Reality Entertainment.

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Posted on 18 Oct 2022 in Non-Fiction |

ANNA SPARGO-RYAN A Kind of Magic. Reviewed by Virginia Muzik

Tags: Anna Spargo-Ryan / memoir / mental illness / panic attacks

Anna Spargo-Ryan’s memoir melds a vivid account of lifelong mental illness with thorough research.

Early on in A Kind of Magic , Anna Spargo-Ryan tries to establish where her mental illness story begins, looking – not surprisingly – to her family. Did she inherit depression from a paternal grandfather or a ‘long-ago uncle’? OCD from her maternal grandmother? Anxiety and catastrophising from her parents?

As she recalls possible points of the genesis of her mental illness, Spargo-Ryan admits memory is seldom reliable, while noting childhood memory in particular is crucial to how we form our identities:

Throughout our lives, but especially as children, we take in and store information that propels us through the rest of our existence. None of it is definitive. Memories that seem clear to us as adults are changed by many factors: the passing of years, trauma, injury, decay. Even the act of remembering distorts it; we recall and store a memory differently every time. Among our tools for developing our sense of self are fabrications, hearsay, things that happened in a dream and stuff that was actually on TV.

Spargo-Ryan examines the nature of memory and identity – and our responses to both – throughout the book. She splices together memories from her childhood, teenage years and early adulthood with more recent recollections – not always in chronological order, perhaps to demonstrate the temporal fluidity of memory, and how trauma memory especially can trap our present selves in a past moment:

Trauma draws fault lines between short- and long-term memory to the extent that it can be impossible to know when we are in time. Long-ago atrocities persist as newly created memories. As threats.

The main chapters are narrated in the past tense, but some are preceded by brief, present-tense scenes titled with months of the year. In these scenes, Spargo-Ryan recounts her experience of myriad mental illnesses and her specific interactions with mental health support: her therapist, a crisis assessment and treatment team, and her family.

These separate timelines (which eventually converge) give the narrative a somewhat disjointed feel that mimics the non-linear nature of memory. It also serves to chart Spargo-Ryan’s path to a degree of healing and self-acceptance.

With main chapter titles lifted from what she calls ‘the clinical or technical definition of an aspect of life with mental illness’ , Spargo-Ryan aims to show how poorly these terms reflect a person’s deeply individual experience of mental illness.

The titles also reinforce another important theme in the work: how the inadequacies of the language used to diagnose, define and discuss mental illness can lead to gaps in communication between someone with mental illness and health professionals, as Spargo-Ryan has experienced:

Language fell devastatingly short in getting me the appropriate help … When I said I had anxiety, what I actually meant was that my thoughts and body weren’t synchronised and it made me frightened – I was panicked, but also extremely confused … I couldn’t put these experiences into words they could match up with their clinical tools.

She also acknowledges how language and literacy levels can further impede access to appropriate treatment:

As with many invisible illnesses, professionals rely on a patient to accurately self-assess. This assumes both a level of literacy and the capacity to match an abstract feeling to a concrete diagnostic criteria.

This is a thoroughly researched work (emerging from a PhD project), but it’s more accessible than academic. Spargo-Ryan deftly weaves in a mix of citations to back up or contrast her personal experience, which makes for an engaging and enlightening read.

Spargo-Ryan’s personal recollections are also in clear, accessible language. At times urgent, frightening and funny, she manages to move the reader without using flowery or melodramatic prose. She balances the dark and harrowing moments with humour and singularly original turns of phrase. In a section recalling the day she met her partner, Gaz, she writes:

I smelled horrible. I smelled like someone you would find in your cupboard and fend off with a rake. I know because I have been that person and I know how I smelled then.

It’s Spargo-Ryan’s descriptions of her panic attacks, and psychotic and dissociative episodes, that are especially compelling. In a vivid example, she recounts a psychotic episode when she was four months pregnant with her first child:

I opened my eyes and I was not there. Nobody was inside of me. Not me or the baby. The shell of a body frightened me. Help , I said. Help. HELP. Then I was up, scrambling out of the makeshift bed. My skeleton raced to catch up with me, running, sprinting.

In a later, particularly poignant section, Spargo-Ryan reflects on how terrifying it was as a six year old to witness her mother having a panic attack; how she’d often blame herself for it. To lessen the impact of her mental illness on her two children, Spargo-Ryan is able to explain to them what’s happening as it’s happening:

Now when I’m having a panic attack, I can pull it together enough to say to them, ‘This isn’t your fault. You’re safe. I’m not in danger, my brain just thinks I am.’

Through writing her story, Spargo-Ryan says she has ‘rewritten my identity. I have an improved understanding of what happened and why. I have come to a sense of forgiveness …’ Through sharing it, she offers compassion and companionship – to herself and the reader. As she says in a video on her website : ‘I hope that it can become like a friend on your bookshelf.’

A Kind of Magic is ultimately an uplifting read that’s brimming with hope. It’s especially affirming for anyone living with mental illness. For those wishing to better understand what that’s like (perhaps even mental health clinicians, therapists and support workers), this book may help bridge gaps in communicating such an individual experience, hopefully leading to better health care.

Anna Spargo-Ryan A Kind of Magic Ultimo Press 2022 PB 352 pp $36.99

Virginia Muzik lives and writes on Gadigal land. Her memoir works are featured in the 2022 Hunter Writers Centre Grieve anthology and online journals. She is slowly working on a full-length memoir. Find her on Twitter @writeNOISEComms and virginiamuzik.com

You can buy  A Kind of Magic from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia .

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October 8 – 14, 2022  |  No. 420

Anna Spargo-Ryan A Kind of Magic: A memoir about anxiety, our minds, and optimism in spite of it all

An astounding fact: some who witnessed firsthand the infamous killing fields of Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia went blind afterwards. Their eyes could still “see” in a physical sense – their optic nerve remained undamaged. They just couldn’t admit the horrors they had seen.

The idea that madness might manifest itself in terms of metaphor rather than clinical categories says something about the fluidity of mental illness over time. No sooner have we captured its essence than it shifts, along with our responses to it. A devout woman in pre-modern Europe who hears voices or has visions might be revered as a mouthpiece of God. Her present-day equivalent would likely be medicated or placed in care.    

Anna Spargo-Ryan’s memoir is interested in our evolving vocabularies for mental illness, those conceptual nets we use to catch human disorder and distress. And hers is not an idle curiosity – it is the desperate search for flotsam of a woman drowning at sea. The author admits that her first encounter with anxiety occurred when she was just three years old, a tiny girl on a sofa anchoring herself to the cushions in case she flew off into space.

But the radical incongruity between Spargo-Ryan’s life experiences and those belonging to the world of the “sane” turns out to have many beginnings: “It is a timeless, limitless genesis,” she writes: “A Möbius strip. Beginning and ending both.”

It starts with the family history of suicide and mental illness that haunts her DNA. Or with the psychotic break that blindsides her as a teenager living in a Melbourne share house. Post-partum depression descends on the author following the birth of her daughter when she is just shy of 20, while later in adulthood there are compulsive disorders, panic attacks, even dissociative experiences that leave Spargo-Ryan pointing ambulance officers towards a body that has done a runner on her.

All of which makes A Kind of Magic read, at times, like a volume of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders enacted as a one-woman play. It’s a performance in which a dull series of abstract diagnoses is registered – with electrifying immediacy – as shameful, terrifying or exhausting autobiographical ordeals.

This can lead to moments where readers feel like they’ve been dumped off a bridge in a sackful of frantic cats. Spargo-Ryan’s talents as a creative writer – she is the author of two emotionally taut and beautifully realised novels – are such that we suffer her hurt and bafflement in claustrophobic proximity.

What saves the telling of her life story from the manifest darkness looming over it is threefold. Her sense of humour, for one, is deftly deployed and always brutally honest. She remains capable of reflecting on the absurdity of her situation, even under the most extreme psychological duress.

Then there is the distancing effect of her research into various emerging categories of, or theories about, mental illness. The hard science dealing with the brain’s soft machinery is scattered through loosely chronological chapters, taking the author from earliest childhood to today. Together it furnishes the layperson with an elegant precis of how our understanding of mental illness has expanded in range and subtlety of degree over time.

What finally saves A Kind of Magic from the cul-de-sac of solipsism is Spargo-Ryan’s loving and fretful descriptions of those family members, partners and friends who have kept her afloat. Her cherished Nana, for example, whose home is a regular haven during the worst bouts of illness in her youth and who was a fellow OCD sufferer long before the disorder was well known. Or Gaz, Spargo-Ryan’s long-term partner, a man whose gentleness and infinite patience she relies on in ways large and small throughout difficult years spent re-establishing a career and raising two children from an early marriage. Gaz, she says, has the empathetic attentiveness to her moods of an emotional support animal and the grounding competence of a man who works with his hands.

For her long-suffering parents, Spargo-Ryan has only clear-eyed love and gratitude. She does not soft-pedal for one moment the sheer hell she put them through when she was going through her own. Indeed, when her younger child reaches his teens and admits to periods of depression and suicidal thoughts, Spargo-Ryan is confronted by a generational mirror offering a cruel reflection. The saddest moments of the narrative confront the possibility that, in giving new life, Spargo-Ryan has perpetuated a form of misery that she considered uniquely hers. Overlaying all this is the quality of her prose. From chattily demotic to clinically rigorous, from anguished Modernist stream of consciousness to controlled retrospection, Spargo-Ryan is capable of modulating her style without ever breaking faith with a voice that is inimitably her own. It’s this consistency that, more than anything else, imposes coherence over a life that often lacks it. A Kind of Magic is not the account of a passage from illness to health; it doesn’t have that soothing progress. Rather it describes the move from experiences that are inexplicable, disorienting and lonely towards a richer, more schematically sophisticated appreciation of mental illness. A monster named and described loses some of its power to terrify, after all.

Spargo-Ryan quotes literary critic Paul de Man at one point: “the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life”. By making a literary artefact out of lifelong mental disorder, A Kind of Magic turns clinical diagnosis back into metaphor. She makes something shapely and true from a lifetime of pain.

Readers will feel keenly how hard it has been for Spargo-Ryan – they will finish the book praying for her to “get well”. But they may also feel, as Freud apocryphally said after welcoming a distraught Gustav Mahler to his legendary sofa and sight-reading the composer’s latest symphony: “Please don’t let me cure you of this. ” 

Ultimo Press, 256pp, $36.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 8, 2022 as "A Kind of Magic: A memoir about anxiety, our minds, and optimism in spite of it all, Anna Spargo-Ryan".

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October 8 – 14, 2022 Edition No. 420

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A Kind of Magic by Anna Spargo-Ryan

Reviewed by Jackie Tang

Anna Spargo-Ryan’s A Kind of Magic is a memoir of a mind and the courage it takes to build a sense of self. Spargo-Ryan has lived with mental illness as a constant in her life. As a child, she was gripped with persistent anxiety that something terrible would happen. As a young person just out of high school, she weathered extreme stretches of dissociation – ‘my brain protected itself from itself, sliding more and more layers of glass between me and the world’. She has experienced overwhelming thoughts and feelings that can cause her to question her sense of worth, her memories of the past, her place in time – in effect, her confidence in the reality of the life she has built for herself.

And yet, what a life it is. As you read this powerful memoir, what becomes apparent is how hard Spargo-Ryan has worked to carve out something loving, meaningful and hers, and how scrupulously she assesses her own mental health history. Too often discussions of mental illness can tend toward over-simplification and diagnostic criteria – people want to ‘understand’ what’s wrong with someone – at the expense of the experiences of the person themselves. A Kind of Magic wants to right that imbalance. It rejects the easiness of linear narrative and causal family histories; instead Spargo-Ryan skips around moments of her life, asking probing questions and turning them over and over against the light to explore their facets: ‘I offer my own story as evidence I can build a self. As an interrogation of the connective tissue that exists inside me somewhere.’

This is not an esoteric book by any measure. Spargo-Ryan writes with lucid beauty and an eye for small details that animate a memory. Her language is clear and accessible, and her tone is calm and authoritative, occasionally juddering into a visceral stream of consciousness to immerse the reader in an experience of psychosis, or rising into impassioned rhetoric to rail against the failures of our mental health system. If you enjoy emotive memoirs that blend introspection, deep research and stylish prose, this will be essential reading.

Jackie Tang is the editor of Readings Monthly.

A Kind of Magic (Anna Spargo-Ryan, Ultimo)

It’s still quite something to read a book that speaks the truth about mental health. A Kind of Magic is Anna Spargo-Ryan’s epic, relentlessly honest autobiography of a life lived under the many umbrellas of mental illness. It is a wonderful, wide-ranging feat. We move with Spargo-Ryan through debilitating mental health challenges, from childhood through to unattended book launches, but rarely in chronological order, as her illness often disrupts space and continuity. No matter what happens, however, Spargo-Ryan’s anxiety is ever present and pervasive, both in her life and in her writing. Needling. Never-ending. This is the way to write it: as it really is. There is hope at the end of this book, but thank god it’s the sort of hope we actually need: the hope, slowly emerging in mainstream society, that those of us with mental health challenges will be seen and heard rather than being wished better. With each new book that a woman writes about herself in this way we are gifted with an invitation to empathy. Spargo-Ryan shows us, with grace and brutal experience, just how much there is to wade through before people eventually acquire the tools to survive. Readers who enjoyed Spargo-Ryan’s first two books, The Paper House and The Gulf— or who have latched on to her Twitter feed—will absorb A Kind of Magic with gusto.

Rebecca Whitehead is a freelance writer from Melbourne.

Category: Reviews

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A Kind of Magic

• 4.5 • 16 Ratings

Publisher Description

A memoir about anxiety, our minds, and optimism in spite of it all Where do mental illness stories begin?   Anna’s always had too many feelings. Or not enough feelings – she’s never been quite sure. Debilitating panic. Extraordinary melancholy. Paranoia. Ambivalence. Fear. Despair.    From anxious child to terrified parent, mental illness has been a constant. A harsh critic in the big moments –  teenage pregnancy, divorce, a dream career, falling in love – and a companion in the small ones – getting to the supermarket, feeding all her cats, remembering which child is which.   But between therapists’ rooms and emergency departments, there’s been a feeling even harder to explain … optimism.   In this sharp-eyed and illuminating memoir, award-winning writer Anna Spargo-Ryan pieces together the relationships between time, mental illness, and our brain as the keeper of our stories. Against the backdrop of her own experience, she interrogates reality, how it can be fractured, and why it’s so hard to put it back together.    Powerfully honest, tender and often funny,  A Kind of Magic  blends meticulous research with vivid snapshots of the stuff that breaks us, and the magic of finding ourselves again. PRAISE for A Kind of Magic 'The magic in this necessary and beautiful book is how deftly Spargo-Ryan shines her light on life's dark materials to offer comfort and inspiration to the rest of us. A must read.' – Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer 'Anna Spargo-Ryan writes with the kind of searing insight and beauty that both shatters your soul and also pieces it back together. I hope she never stops.' – Clementine Ford, author of Fight Like A Girl and How We Love ‘No one’s writing like Anna Spargo-Ryan right now. With the grace, calm and reassuring grip of your best friend’s hand, she leads you through exactly what it feels like for your mind to unravel, heart to explode and life to fall apart. Then, reassuringly, she leads you through what’s happening, tells you what it means and even makes you laugh. And you come out feeling like for all the pain, a good life is still within reach.’ – Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law and Gaysia   ' A Kind of Magic is one of the most accurate, insightful and honestly rendered depictions of mental illness I’ve read. Anna writes with warmth, humour, unvarnished truth and courage about her darkest moments and the many ways in which her brain has lied to her over the years.' – Jill Stark, author of High Sobriety and Happy Never After 'so open-hearted, so generous and so funny that in its darkest moments – and there are many – you will find yourself enraged by the medical industry that failed her, and by those who didn’t help. An eternal optimist and a gorgeous writer, Spargo-Ryan proves that no matter how much stigma surrounds an illness – and how ferociously that illness might mess with your memory, identity, life – you still have agency and a narrative that deserves respect.' –  The Guardian 'It’s still quite something to read a book that speaks the truth about mental health.  A Kind of Magic  is Anna Spargo-Ryan’s epic, relentlessly honest autobiography of a life lived under the many umbrellas of mental illness. It is a wonderful, wide-ranging feat … This is the way to write it: as it really is. There is hope at the end of this book, but thank god it’s the sort of hope we actually need: the hope, slowly emerging in mainstream society, that those of us with mental health challenges will be seen and heard rather than being wished better.' – Books + Publishing ' told with immense humour and heart' –  The Australian ' generous and unflinching' –  The West Australian 'A Kind of Magic is ultimately a hopeful book. Spargo-Ryan’s personal story is undeniably dark; her memoir is an ongoing survivor’s story. It is also very, very funny, and touching, and deeply empathetic.' –  The Conversation 'With humour, generosity and courage, Anna Spargo-Ryan narrates an experience that is so often impossible to put into words. By taking us inside therapy sessions, hospital wards, and cars, rooms and self-talk that act as entrapment, we are given an opportunity to learn, to empathise and to love. A Kind of Magic should be read by anyone wanting to understand mental illness, and for anyone with mental illness wanting to be understood.' – Kylie Maslen, author of  Show Me Where It Hurts ' A Kind of Magic  has achieved something quite marvellous – it is somehow both as funny as it is suffused with grief; just as it manages to balance its gentle wisdom with moments of wonderful silliness, and to convey something of the mental and bodily experience of psychosis and panic in a manner that’s neither abstracted nor voyeuristic, but rather vitally, pulsingly alive. And it’s a page-turner, to boot. This is a book brimming with character as well as life, all the more striking for the painful material from which it has been built.' – Fiona Wright, author of Small Acts of Disappearance and The World Was Whole 'Exquisitely honest,  A Kind of Magic  is an unforgettable example of empowerment via the gradual restructuring of narrative identity' –  ArtsHub ' A Kind of Magic  is ultimately an uplifting read that’s brimming with hope. It’s especially affirming for anyone living with mental illness. For those wishing to better understand what that’s like (perhaps even mental health clinicians, therapists and support workers), this book may help bridge gaps in communicating such an individual experience, hopefully leading to better health care.' – Newtown Review of Books

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Discussion Forums about Books and Reading | Official Review: A Kind of Magic by Ryder Phoenix - reviewer Mvictoria

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Official Review: A Kind of Magic by Ryder Phoenix

Post by Mvictoria » 10 Feb 2021, 19:49

Re: Official Review: A Kind of Magic by Ryder Phoenix

Post by Chigo Nwagboso » 11 Feb 2021, 12:02

Post by ValeriaU » 11 Feb 2021, 17:24

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Post by Kasun Perera » 14 Feb 2021, 22:29

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Kid’s Book Review: A Tricky Kind of Magic

By Sarah Tyson

About the Book and Author

Cooper is brilliant at magic tricks. Card tricks, clever illusions – he can do them all. His dad, also known as the Great Eduardo, taught him the tricks of the magical trade before he passed away. But the one thing Cooper can’t do is see his dad again.

So when a talking rabbit appears from his dad’s top hat, and reveals there is a place where Cooper might find him, he jumps at the chance. Magic is about believing the impossible, after all. And Cooper desperately wants to believe that he can see his dad once more.

But what – and who – is waiting for them in the land where magic goes wrong?

Nigel Baines is an experienced illustrator and book designer who has worked for various trade publishing houses. He is a keen walker and would like to spend half the year living on top of the Andes. His other great loves are Grantham Town Football Club and any kind of travel.

Book Review

I quite like the comic book style of writing because it's adventurous and different to what I usually read

A Tricky Kind of Magic is a very interesting book and it made me laugh. The main character’s name is Cooper and his main companion is a rabbit. I like them both. There are other good characters like Finn, Cooper’s brother. There are lots of twists and turns in this funny tale. Cooper is intelligent and the thing he loves to do most is magic tricks. Sadly Cooper’s Dad passed away and Cooper really wants to bring his Dad back to life with magic.

Along the way he faces challenges though. Cooper is a very determined boy. The ending is happy as Cooper realises that his Dad isn’t entirely lost and will remain in his heart forever.

I quite like the comic book style of writing because it’s adventurous and different to what I usually read. I really like the black and white illustrations because they are imaginative, detailed and sometimes funny.

I might like to read more of Nigel Baines’ books in the future and I would definitely recommend this book to my friends and especially fans of comic books.

If you would would like to buy a copy of the book we invite you to order it from your local independent book shop.

Or, you can shop on-line and support our kids reviews page b y sourcing your discounted book via this link.

Please By Here

Alternatively, we suggest that you visit your local library and request to borrow a copy from a friendly librarian.

Whichever you choose we hope you enjoy being part of your unique reading community – happy reading everyone!

Reviewer Profile

• Name: Oscar
• Age: 7 years
• Likes: Apples, football and chess
• Dislikes: Broccoli and spiders
• Favourite Book: Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
• Favourite Song: Fields of Gold by Sting
• Favourite Film: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

BUN Kids’ Reviews is a non-profit project committed to promoting reading for pleasure and enabling young readers to discover new books and authors

If you are aged 2-17 years and enjoy reading books or listening to stories why not  apply to join our junior review panel by contacting Books Up North by email or via social media? *You will receive a FREE copy of the book!

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Tags: graphic novel

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IT'S ALL A KIND OF MAGIC

The young ken kesey.

by Rick Dodgson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 2013

A missed opportunity to put one of America’s truly unique writers in a larger historical context.

A British scholar unearths the roots of one of the 20th century’s most brash and colorful writers and public figures.

Blame Tom Wolfe and that damn bus. Due to the image of novelist Ken Kesey (1935–2001), popularized in the pages of Wolfe’s  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , the writer has been nearly doomed to historical obscurity as the drug-addled leader of the Merry Pranksters. In fact, Kesey was a brilliant, sensitive and ambitious creator, as interested in the act of performance as he was in the accolades of critical success. In this slim biography, Dodgson (History/Lakeland Coll.) examines how Kesey’s early influences, his contemporaries and the times he was born into all shaped his evolution from literary lion to ringleader of the countercultural circus. Dodgson first met Kesey in 1999, shortly before the author’s untimely death. While the young scholar is careful not to imply a true friendship with the author, he displays an obvious giddiness at meeting the icon; Dodgson seems more in awe at Kesey’s collection of artifacts than in the man himself. The author provides a fairly straightforward examination of Kesey’s early life and works, with special attention paid to the bohemian scene around Perry Lane near Stanford University and the development of  One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest  and  Sometimes A Great Notion . Dodgson does turn up a few unexpected gems from a largely unreported era of Kesey’s life, including anecdotes about fellow travelers like Neal Cassady and Ken Babbs. But, much like the collective hangover left over from the 1960s, the book also suffers from the same revisionist romanticism that dogged Kesey’s remaining decades. “Theirs was not a revolution of guns and glory,” Dodgson writes. “It was a new type of revolution: one of morals, of manners, and of the mind.” Heavy, man.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-299-29510-3

Page Count: 196

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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Eternal Magic

By alexandra ivy, you must sign in to see if this title is available for request. sign in or register now, send netgalley books directly to your kindle or kindle app, to read on a kindle or kindle app, please add [email protected] as an approved email address to receive files in your amazon account. click here for step-by-step instructions., also find your kindle email address within your amazon account, and enter it here., pub date feb 25 2025 | archive date mar 04 2025, kensington publishing | lyrical press, romance | sci fi & fantasy.

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