Magnetic Magic (Final Retrospective, Part 1) - Plot
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me for this series of mini-reviews that will serve as the retrospective to Magnetic Magic. Most of the things will be discussing here have been discussed in greater depth in the reviews of individual books, so I do encourage you check those out if you haven’t already. Today, we’re going to be doing a high-level overview of Plot, with Character, Worldbuilding, and a finale that covers Romance and Themes coming in successive weeks.
Let’s dive right in. There’s some bookkeeping first, then I’ll share my overall rating for the series. From there, we’ll go through the major plot threads, in order of appearance, and analyze how well they were executed at the level of the series.
STATS
Series: Magnetic Magic
Author(s): Lindsay Buroker
Genre: Fantasy (Urban)
First Printing: January 2025 through August 2025
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
SPOILER WARNING
Heavy, unmarked spoilers will be provided for the entirety of the Magnetic Magic series. I’m also going to assume that you’ve already read my reviews for the individual books.
TERMINOLOGY
The names of the books in this series are all rather similar, so we’ll be abbreviating them as follows.
Way of the Wolf (Book 1) = Way
Relics of the Wolf (Book 2) = Relics
Kin of the Wolf (Book 3) = Kin
Quest of the Wolf (Book 4) = Quest
Curse of the Wolf (Book 5) = Curse
Triumph of the Wolf (Book 6) = Triumph
Also, I will be referring to the werewolves in this setting who are capable of assuming a half-human, half-wolf form as “hybrids”.
OVERALL RATING: 6.5 / 10
This is a decent indie series that tells a straightforward story in a serialized format. Buroker wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here, just tell a story her audience would enjoy. She does so through a narrative that holds together fairly well, with characters who are at least sympathetic and a world that mostly holds together. If you’re looking for some Urban Fantasy short novels to provide a moment of escapsim, I think this may be a good series for you.
BREAKDOWN OF PLOT THREADS
As a serialized narrative, Magnetic Magic juggles a few different balls in each book. While there are problems that get introduced and resolved in one book, these are ultimately stages within longer plot theeads. Now that we have the full picture, let’s assess these threads across the series.
Plot 1: Lunas’s Werewolf Heritage & Pack Politics
This plot thread encompasses Luna reconnecting with her werewolf nature, her mother’s cancer and pressuring of Luna to have a werewolf child, Augustus’s antagonism, and everything involving the pack amulets.
I feel this works the best out of all the threads in the series. Everything here makes sense. Luna’s mother’s illness destabilizes pack power dynamics and lures Luna home, Luna needs to take action to protect herself, and eventually takes a more active role in helping the family she once cut dies with.
The only criticism I have of this plot thread is something I’ve mentioned before: Augustus was eliminated as an antagonist too early, forcing the crime wave (more on that shortly) to fill in the space he vacated. That’s not really a problem with this specific plot thread, though. Any other established thread could have stepped up in the place of the crime wave.
Plot 2: Luna’s Past
This is one of two plot threads in this series where I feel the negatives outweigh any positive qualities.
For most of the series, this wasn’t so much a plot thread as a backstory element to explain why Luna cut ties with the pack in the first place. The lingering trauma of killing Raoul was something that hung over Luna in the first book but which faded into the background. Once Luna made a conscious decision to stop suppressing her werewolf nature (versus merely dealing with a potion shortage), she had overcome this. All of this was fine. It explained a lot about Luna’s characterization and gave emotional significance to her decision to reconnect with her werewolf side.
Where things fall apart is the reintroduction if Izzy. This antagonist is introduced in Curse - remember, this is the second-to-last book - for just one fight scene. She then pops up in Triumph for another fight scene before needing to ve rescued in the climax. If Izzy were merely some random werewolf associated with another plot thread, this might have worked, but Buroker chose to associate her with Luna’s traumatic past. She should have been at least a big an antagonist for Luna as Abrams was for Duncan.
Plot 3: The Box
This is a plot thread that works because of its simplicity. The box and the drudic artifact inside it collectively serve as a MacGuffin to be searched for / protected. Well I find the application of its healing magic (and the times said magic doesn't work) to be very contrived, Buroker at least sticks with those rules once she sets them.
Plot 4: Radomir & Abrams
While I have a lot of issues with the fluctuating competence of these characters, I think they collectively work as an antagonist to drive conflict. Their ties to Duncan lend an emotional weight to the problems they cause. Their resources and willingness to engage in violence also make them into a meaningful threat, at least during the first half of the series.
My main gripe with this plot thread, as mentioned previously, is that Radomir took center stage as the external threat to Luna and Duncan, while Abrams was the emotional threat. Killing Radomir off in the Curse left Abrams alone. He simply didn't have the overt menace on his own to carry the climax of the series.
I feel like the easiest way to resolve this would have been to just combine Radomir and Abrams into one character who survived all the way to Triumph. That would have maintained the threat level of this plot thread all the way to the end of the series.
Plot 5: Crime Wave
This is the other plot thread that just doesn't work.
The crime problem is established as early as the first took and is used to incite a couple of fight scenes. However, it doesn’t take narrative focus until Duncan is MIA in Quest. At this point, it just feels like a threat to fill a narrative void left behind by Augustus. There’s no emotional weight there. Luna and Duncan just have a couple of fight scenes before the thread evaporates by the end of Curse. Buroker then ends up introducing a new, merely identical threat in Triumph to trigger another first scene (that being the encounter with the two wizards attacking the ghost hunters), making it seem like resolving this is Curse created another narrative void.
Either Augustus needed to die later in the series so that the initial void didn't exist, or else the crime wave needed to be modified into a threat that would last through the end of Triumph.
Plot 6: Chad & Real Estate Issues
This is a lot thread where my only real complaint is that we didn’t get more of it.
Both Luna’s dynamic with Chad and her ambitions in real estate are established early on in the series and resurface in association with other plot threads throughout. It isn’t until Triumph that they take focus as their own plot thread. It’s here that Luna gets her final confrontation with Chad, deals with the plot to steal her pack’s land, and has to deal with the sale of her apartment complex.
Given the connections to Luna’s past and her future goals, it’s a shame this was saved for the last book. This would have been a very effective way to fill the void left by Augustus’s death.
PRE-PLANNING
How much did Buroker plot out this series in advance?
To be clear, I do believe that she did extensive planning. These books are tightly paced and keep to a fairly consistent length. Elements introduced in later books build off of previously established elements and don't cannibalize what came before. The only thing that I can think of that was set up but didn’t get some form of payoff was Luna finding cameras hidden in her room in Way, and even then, I may just be forgetting the moment when their origin was confirmed. These results aren’t what one typically gets from an author playing things by ear, just as a bloated, meandering, cannibalistic narrative isn't what one typically gets from a series that is fully plotted in advance.
What I’m focusing on with this question is the fact that a lot of number of issues we just covered are concentrated in the back half of the series. I suspect that this is a symptom of Buroker’s commitments as a full-time indie author. Her brand is built on releasing serialized stories within fairly tight time frames (the books in this series had only about 2 months between them, with Way and Relics being released in the same month). She doesn’t have the luxury of making her audience cool their heels for a year or more between books. She doesn’t have infinite time to make up the story as she goes along and then redraft until she has something coherent. She also can’t commit to writing an entire series before she knows if people are going to read past the first few books.
So when I look at a gradual buildup of narrative issues as the series progresses, I don’t see an author who has no idea what she’s doing or who isn’t invested in telling a good story. I see someone who is most likely working off an outline she prepared well in advance and who doesn’t have the time for substantial deviations from that outline. The filler-like nature of the crime wave, the sudden appearance yet insignificant impact of Izzy, and the strangeness of how Abrams was handled in Triumph all feel like pre-planned elements that Buroker either unconsciously drifted away from while developing the story and characters from novel to novel or consciously tried to tweak after seeing audience feedback to the first few books. It’s sort of like how the songs should be the first thing written for a musical production, yet sometimes the script of the narrative deviates from the story concept when the songs were written. The result is a story where things feel just a bit off.
Obviously, this is all speculation. What I’m trying to saw is that I’m willing to extend Buroker herself the benefit of the doubt. It’s the same as my feelings for tie-in authors. Yes, we’re talking about adult professionals who put themselves into boxes, but what they do inside those boxes in enough to convince me that they genuinely care about the work they’re doing. I’m convinced that, if Buroker had the luxury of Rebecca Yarros’s release schedule, she would easily be able to correct all of the errors we’ve discussed here today.
Keep up the good work, Ms. Buroker.
STATIC CLING
On next Wednesday, February 25th, we’ll continued this retrospective of Magnetic Magic with Part 2, discussing the characters of Magnetic Magic. As covered during the individual book reviews, Magnetic Magic is driven by plot, not characters, yet that doesn’t mean that characters are bad. It just means that we’ll have less to discuss in terms of them developing and more in terms of how they function as static entities.
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Volume I of my first serialized Romantasy novel, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones, is now premiering over in Tales of the Five Worlds!
Kabarāhira is a city of necromancers, and among these necromancers, none are more honorable or respected than Master Japjot Baig. Yadleen has worked under him since she was a girl, learning how commune with bhūtas and how to bind these ancient spirits into wights. Her orderly world is disrupted, however, when a stranger appears with the skeleton of a dishonored woman, demanding that her master fabricate a wight for him.
To protect her master from scandal, Yadleen must take it upon herself to meet this stranger’s demands. Manipulating the dead is within her power, but can honor survive in the face of a man who has none?
Chapters 1 through 5 are is now available! I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.
