The Grimoire of Grave Fates

De: Hanna Alkaf - creator, Margaret Owen - creator

Narrado por: January LaVoy, Mx. Nicky Endres

Crack open your spell book and enter the world of the illustrious Galileo Academy for the Extraordinary. There's been a murder on campus, and it's up to the students of Galileo to solve it. Follow 18 authors and 18 students as they puzzle out the clues and find the guilty party.

Professor of Magical History Septimius Dropwort has just been murdered, and now everyone at the Galileo Academy for the Extraordinary is a suspect.

A prestigious school for young magicians, the Galileo Academy has recently undergone a comprehensive overhaul, reinventing itself as a roaming academy in which students of all cultures and identities are celebrated. In this new Galileo, every pupil is welcome—but there are some who aren't so happy with the recent changes. That includes everyone's least favorite professor, Septimius Dropwort, a stodgy old man known for his harsh rules and harsher punishments. But when the professor's body is discovered on school grounds with a mysterious note clenched in his lifeless hand, the Academy's students must solve the murder themselves, because everyone's a suspect.

Told from more than a dozen alternating and diverse perspectives, The Grimoire of Grave Fates follows Galileo's best and brightest young magicians as they race to discover the truth behind Dropwort's mysterious death. Each one of them is confident that only they have the skills needed to unravel the web of secrets hidden within Galileo's halls. But they're about to discover that even for straight-A students, magic doesn't always play by the rules. . . .

Contributors include: Cam Montgomery, Darcie Little Badger, Hafsah Faizal, Jessica Lewis, Julian Winters, Karuna Riazi, Kat Cho, Kayla Whaley, Kwame Mbalia, L. L. McKinney, Marieke Nijkamp, Mason Deaver, Natasha Díaz, Preeti Chhibber, Randy Ribay, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Victoria Lee, and Yamile Saied Méndez

©2023 Margaret Owen and Hanna Alkaf (P)2023 Listening Library

Reseñas de la Crítica

★ “Eighteen heroes, individual yet not alone, beautifully find self-respect and force their school to change.”—Kirkus Reviews

"Readers who’ve been burned by less culturally sensitive wizard schools will rejoice... The range of racial, ethnic, gendered, variously abled, and neurodiverse identities in a magic school setting is vastly appealing, and meditations on 'chosen one' clichés and sly meta-commentary make this especially enjoyable for genre-savvy readers."—The Bulletin

"[A] magical mystery."—Publishers Weekly

No endings!

Story without an ending

CW: murder, death, dead body, injury detail, fire, violence (brief), panic attacks, mental illness, hallucinations, blood, poison, kidnapping, grief, talking skeletons and ghosts

mentions of: loss of loved one, ableism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, bullying, colonization, war, generational trauma, gargoyles, spiders

At a floating magical school, a professor has been murdered. He was evil, bigoted against anyone who wasn’t a straight, white, cis man with sorcerer powers.

Although that character is a bit one-dimensional, the characters of the book are very diverse. There are multiple points of view and they are each written by a different author, which gives the readers a cast that includes 2 Muslims, two physically handicapped people, several non-binary people, as well as people who are Black, Filipino, Korean, Argentinian, and First Nations.

One down side is that it’s hard to keep track of this cast. Someone is mentioned in passing in one chapter and becomes a character a few chapters later. It became really hard to keep track of them all.

Another downside is that each chapter, I got attached to a new character but I didn’t get the satisfaction of seeing their story end. Do these two characters find out that they have crushes on each other? How does that character deal with the truth about their parents? Do these kids who have so much in common become friends and help each other feel less alone? Does that character ever get home?

I DON’T KNOW!!! And I probably never will.

I would like to think that this is the first of a series, but it would be really hard to get all these writers back together and even if they did, I would have trouble remembering all the backstories for these people.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book, but I hated finishing it.

Murder Mystery in a Magical School

I saw this on TikTok described as "Hogwarts students solving a murder but with queer representation" and snatched it up right away.

Each chapter follows a different student as they try to help their friends, or go it alone, while attempting to solve the murder of a teacher.

Great story! Narration was fantastic! Definitely a must have for fans of mysteries with a bit of magic thrown in.

Wow!

I’d love to see behind the scenes on how this all came together. This is a great story and the fact that each chapter is written by a different author is amazing. It is seamless in its storytelling. If you like mysteries and a little magic, this is for you!

Absolutely awful.

Constantly dropped plot threads, a supposed bigot we never see do anything bigoted, and a tagline of “one murderer” when there’s more than that are the least of this book’s problems. As a Muslim, it was super cool and fun and good to learn that we’re all obsessed with sin and otherwise act like stereotypes.

Absolute trash and completely skippable, just an attempt to cash in on the people who liked Harry Potter but want to give money to someone other than Rowling.