Mary Anning was a real-life professional fossil collector and dealer in the first half of the 19th century; given the breadth and depth of her knowledge, she was also a paleontologist, but that wasn’t officially acknowledged until after her death, since she was a woman and therefore ineligible to join the Geological Society of London. In her excellent debut novel The Geomagician (coming March 31), Jennifer Mandula reimagines Mary as a woman living in a world with magic, in which fossils are the best medium for storing magical power. Hunting for freshly exposed fossils after a landslide, she is thrilled to discover a pterodactyl skeleton — and then one of the fossilized eggs comes to life and hatches in her hands! Mary is suddenly faced with new opportunities in her life, and new challenges.
I love the sensory descriptions at the beginning of the book, when Mary is hunting fossils at the cliffs along the beaches of Lyme Regis, with the tactile sensations of sand, shale, and storm, as Mary frantically searches to find something that she can sell to pay the rent on her little fossil shop. After her discovery transports her to London, although there are a few more physically focused passages (including cuddling sessions with the adorable baby pterodactyl), the attention is much more on her emotions and the moral and scientific choices she faces while attempting to find her footing on a higher level of society, facing challenges and dangers she never expected.
Magic is interwoven throughout society; desperately poor people save up their naturally generated weak levels of magic to sell, and rich people buy stored-magic reliqs to make their lives easier, with automatic lights and self-playing musical instruments. A small minority of the population, called witches, can use magic easily, without reliqs, but it’s only been a few hundred years since they were burned at the stake for that. And when Mary goes to London to accompany the geomagicians presenting her findings, she is accused of calling up a demon (the pterodactyl) through sorcery and has to undergo an Inquisition.
Mary’s friend and neighbor, Lucy, accompanies her to London to support her, but spends most of her time with a group agitating for more rights for the poor. She can’t understand why Mary isn’t more interested in helping their class of people to fight for fairer treatment.
But Mary’s waging her own fight. She sees this as her greatest opportunity to finally be allowed to join the Geomagical Society (which comes with a stipend, small for most members but relatively enormous for her) and win recognition for her scholarship as well as her fossil-finding facility. She’s willing to sacrifice almost anything for this. And so she suppresses her resentment of her mentor’s foot-dragging in sponsoring her, and her former fiance’s abandonment of her, seeking alliances in this effort to get the Geomagicians to make an exception for her.
Meanwhile, she’s getting pressure from both sides of a grand debate between creationism (generally believed by the Church and most of society) and supporters of a new theory of evolution. In addition, something she’s spent hardly any thought about is a new invention called the Loom that harvests much more magic from people, more efficiently. Inventor Henry and investor Edgar (Lucy’s brother) say this will uplift England and actually help the poor, while Lucy is horrified. All these pressures continue to mount until Mary finds herself at the center of a struggle for the future of England, its women, and its people in general.
I really enjoyed the gradual broadening of focus throughout this novel, expanding more and more from its original tight focus to essential issues about how people and ideas are treated. It reminded me of the themes in C.L. Polk’s The Kingston Cycle, from exploiting people’s magical resources to the general struggle for liberty in Soulstar.
I noticed just now while looking at the publishing information that this book is actually labeled Book One of the Geomagician Duology, so further adventures of Mary Anning and other characters are apparently coming. I can see a few threads to follow for the future, but this book feels like a complete adventure, with an ending that makes sense, so readers shouldn’t fear being left hanging at the last page.
The Geomagician, by Jennifer Mandula (Book One of the Geomagician Duology), will be published March 31, but you can preorder here.
Content warnings: Institutional and personal sexism, exploitation of the poor.
Comps: The real-life Mary Anning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning); The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth; California Bones and others by Greg van Eekhout; The Memoirs of Lady Trent series by Marie Brennan; and The Kingston Cycle by C.L. Polk, especially Soulstar.
Disclaimers: I received a free eARC of this book from the publisher for review via NetGalley.
