Spell Sweeper
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Featuring a failed young wizard and her cleanup crew, this delightfully dysfunctional middle grade fantasy is an imaginative twist on magic school that’s perfect for fans of Nevermoor and The School for Good and Evil.
Cara Moone is a wizard—but she’s basically flunked out of wizard school. Now she’s in training to be a MOP, also known as Magical Occurrence Purger, also known as it’s Cara’s job to sweep up the hazardous dust a real wizard’s spells leave behind.
A real wizard, that is, like Harlee Wu, the so-called Chosen One destined to save the magical world. But when one of Harlee’s spells goes awry and leaves behind a rift in the fabric of magic itself, it'll take more than magic to clean up the mess.
Luckily, messes are kind of Cara’s thing.
Magic is messy—and fantastically fun—in this underdog story packed with humor, adventure, and attitude.
Cleaning up after the school's star student is one thing. Saving the world from her mistakes is another.
The Un-Chosen One: While the celebrated Harlee Wu gets all the glory, Cara is the one in the shadows with a broom, ready to clean up magical disasters—and maybe cause a few of her own.A New Kind of Magic School: Forget learning flashy spells. At Dragonsong Academy, Cara's crew is taught to handle hazardous spell dust, wrangle troublesome magical creatures, and purge the messes the 'real' wizards leave behind.An Unlikely Team: With her by-the-book crewmate Gusto and a sarcastic three-tailed magic fox named Zuki, Cara has to prove that the cleanup crew has what it takes to be the heroes.Laugh-Out-Loud Adventure: Full of snarky humor, epic magical mishaps, and janitorial-level bravery, this is a fantasy adventure for anyone who's ever felt like they didn't quite fit in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a quirky riff on magic school tropes, Fodi (The Secret of Zoone) enlivens familiar elements through a resourceful, humorous narrator. As part of the Magical Occurrence Purger track at western Canada's Dragonsong Academy, 13-year-old Cara Moone is a spell sweeper in training, learning to tidy away the spell dust left behind by wizards accessing the Field of Magical Matter. The job is crucial—left alone, magical residue "morphs, expands, and takes on a life of its own," becoming feral—but Cara, who hails from a nonmagical Irish American family, nevertheless resents being thought of as a slacker. When spells start going awry, leaving behind toxic black gunk through a "giant, puckering mouth," Cara and her fellow spell sweepers must figure out how to stop the problem before the feral magic wreaks havoc. Convinced that golden brown-skinned Harlee Wu, Dragonsong's 15-year-old star student and so-called "Chosen One," is to blame, Cara investigates her, only for the two to wind up as reluctant partners as the mystery takes them into the nonmagical world. Snarky and resilient, Cara is a memorable heroine with an engaging narrative voice and a unique perspective. Ages 8–12.
