In the beginning of H. G. Parry’s The Magician’s Daughter, Biddy’s entire life has been spent on the magical island Hy-Brasil in the company of the magician Rowan and his rabbit familiar, Hutchincroft. All she knows about the outside world is through the novels she reads – Austen, Dickens, Brontë – and that magic has largely disappeared. Rowan leaves most nights to gather what scraps he can; for what purpose and through how much danger, Biddy is not sure. She loves Hy-Brasil, with its woods, sea-battered cliffs, and elusive faeries, but she is ready to join the wider world. Rowan, alternately warm and distant with constant secrets, is reluctant. That is, until the outside world grows more dangerous and threatens to find them, forcing Rowan to take Biddy off-island, into the wider world, and into confrontation with both of their pasts.

The Magician’s Daughter is many things: a coming-of-age story, a cozy British yarn, and an alternate history where magic is real. It is also, much like its protagonist, very smart in an unassuming way. Biddy is sixteen years old with a good head on her shoulders, but she is caught between longing for an identity of her own and the uncertainty of how much of home she is willing to let go. As her world expands geographically, so too does her awareness of how complicated it is. At the same time, her knowledge of her own past, and Rowan’s, also grows, destabilizing her trust in the one parental figure she’s ever known. She finds herself caught up in a decades-long story, and now she must find her own place in it.

The story sticks to Biddy’s limited perspective in the in-between world of growing up, becoming an adult, and learning where, and in whom, to put one’s faith and where not to. She is not a magician, and she never will be. Her exclusion from the world of magic, having been raised by someone on a magical island, is one of many crisis points in her identity formation.

Behind this compelling story is a backdrop of uncommon, and unpreachy, thematic depth. The loss of magic in the world touches upon themes of modern disenchantment, systems of power, privilege, and abuse of resources to the point of ecological crisis. Biddy’s entrance into the world of early twentieth-century London means we see her confront poverty, classism, and sexism for the first time.

Unlike many orphan-fantasy tales, The Magician’s Daughter is not a chosen-one narrative. Rather, it follows a normal girl learning how to navigate a wide, complicated, and magical world, and sorting out to how to love the complicated people who inhabit it. Or, in the words of her story, “She had seen the world, and the world needed magic. Whatever Rowan had lied about, knowingly, or otherwise, he was right about that. She knew that now, perhaps even more surely than he did, because she was precisely one of those ordinary human creatures who would never normally have known magic existed and yet missed it desperately.”

The magic here is the stuff of fantasy, true, where rabbits can take on human form, mischievous faeries lurk in the woods, and doors can bridge cities. But there is also the magic of kindness, of hospitality, of truly seeing another’s suffering and offering a blessing. And so, The Magician’s Daughter finds magic in expected and unexpected corners of growing up and finding one’s place in the stories that preceded you.