The Grimoire of Grave Fates is a multi-author young adult anthology that features 18 different authors - of various backgrounds - each contributing a story that seemingly responds to the following premise: Showcase a teenager at an international magic school that used to be stolidly traditional and is now opening up to a more diverse - in race, culture, sex, and queerness - student body. The anthology further adds an extra bit to the premise by centering the book around a murder mystery - the murder of a bigoted traditionalist professor who nearly everyone hates.
And so we have 18 stories showcasing the 18 very different magically gifted teenagers as they deal with their own internal struggles - caused by conflicts of culture, typical teenage love (often queer) struggles, of queerness and struggles with identity, etc. - as well as these teens' responses to the murder. And well given that these are teenagers who have often had dreams of being a chosen one, well, for a lot of them that involves trying to solve said murder mystery. And that's where this book kind of struggles, because the multi author approach - and constant shifting of characters - to the mystery makes it feel incredibly disjointed, so anyone who comes here looking for a coherent mystery, rather than a collection of solid YA flash fiction, will be a bit disappointed.
More specific safter the jump:
Plot Summary:
The Galileo Academy for the Extraordinary is a topnotch magical school for teens around the world. Once bound to England, the school now travels around the world and features a more diverse student body, featuring students of various cultures and ethnicities, of different genders, and who have very different but equally valuable magical specialties specific to them. That said, some of the backers of the university, and some of the professors, still prefer the old state of the school and continue to have bigoted attitudes towards their new student body.
One of those professors was Professor Dropwort, Galileo's history teacher and resident bigoted bully. So when Galileo is found murdered, no one is that unhappy about it....but in a school full of teens with burgeoning magic and growing insecurities about their own self-worth, it soon becomes increasingly popular for these students to try and each individually figure out who killed him....before the authorities finger someone innocent just to close the case first.
Usually for anthologies I don't include a plot summary but The Grimoire of Grave Fates is kind of a weird book. On one hand, the book is a sort of a collection of flash fiction about the very diverse (in race, culture, sex, queerness, etc.) teens in this academy (with one exception) and how they react to being in this new environment which promises to help them learn but still retains some of its bigoted attitudes in some places. On the other hand, the book also tries to be a murder mystery novel, with each character's (and author's) story taking place after the other chronologically and advancing the story of the mystery, such that the first story features a character discovering Dropwort's dead body and the last story featuring the culprit being caught. So the plot summary above, and to be honest myself reading this book, read the collection as if it was supposed to be a mystery to be enjoyed as such.
And well, as a murder mystery, The Grimoire of Grave Fates is a frustrating story. Because each author switches off their protagonist - and because most of the protagonists have little to do with the others - the novel feels INCREDIBLY disjointed: one character's story will make a discovery about the murder - like the motive or what the bigoted criminal professor was up to - and then the next character's story will feature another character who never learns about that discovery from the prior character and/or discovers it on their own and/or will completely ignore that discovery entirely. Some characters will pop up repeatedly from story to story, but most don't, and teasers about various characters in one story will never be followed up upon often (for example, in the first story, main character Wren notes that they are the only necromancer, an illegal magic, but that character Jamie is immune to their magic. Many stories later, Jamie is revealed to be another necromancer and is teased by the idea that there is another person like him there...but nothing ever comes of this and they never meet). The murder mystery is essentially solved, with little to no help from anyone else, by the last few protagonists....and then, with NO help from them whatsoever, the last character stops the culprit. It just feels incredibly frustrating if you come at this story like a murder mystery novel, because its incredibly disjointed, with the various new developments being only 50/50 to ever be acted upon, and you never getting to see earlier characters again outside of occasional mentions.
Fortunately, The Grimoire of Grave Fates works far better if you ignore the murder mystery and treat this as a series of flash fic or short stories (really more like flash fic) about a diverse cast of teenage characters in a magic school breaking with tradition and becoming more diverse in the best ways possible. You have a couple of trans characters dealing with trans issues - one dealing with their struggles with others' bigotries, one dealing more with the fact that his transition hasn't made everything automatically better, even if it was clearly the right thing to do; you have a couple of characters dealing with struggles with friends and crushes (Kat Cho's story of her character Jia Park is adorable); you have a pair of girls in love with each other trying to keep the others from being a suspect; you have black; Hispanic; Muslim and other characters dealing with prejudice; you have a disabled girl dealing with ableism; you have multiple characters dealing with traditional expectations from families and legacies they don't feel they can live up to, etc. etc. It's a very big amount of variety and the stories generally work. That said, because they're trapped in the murder mystery framework, many of the stories really feel more like flash fiction than full short stories as they don't really have full arcs, but instead just have plots that deal with their characters' issues and then hand off a clue to the next character. But they're enjoyable and worthwhile flash fic, if that, even if not every one works (one of the last stories is basically a "girl detective" story that's kind of a complete miss).
So in short, The Grimoire of Grave Fates is a solid collection of YA flash fiction that should work rather well for a diverse audience...if they can not get too disappointed by the murder mystery framework. A solid book for the right reader with that caution.
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