OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Saint is a literary agent, author, and village wise woman in training. A graduate of the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the theological studies program at Princeton Seminary, she currently lives in Boston with her partner, spoiled Persian cat, and vintage blazer collection.

FORMAT/INFO: Evocation was published on May 28th, 2024 by Angry Robot Books. It is 304 pages long and told in third person from the points of view of David, Rhys, and Moira. It is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: David lives a charmed life. He's got a high profile job as an attorney and is the best medium in the area, catering to an exclusive secret club of occult practitioners. But David didn't realize how literally his life was charmed until his abilities begin to fade and voices ring in his head. Turns out, the myths about his ancestor making a pact with a devil aren't merely myths after all. With a curse slowly draining him, he turns to the only people who might be able to help: David's ex-boyfriend Rhys and Rhys's wife Moira. But in turning to this sorcerer and witch duo, David finds himself forging unexpected bonds in ways he never thought he would.

Evocation is a story heavy on exploring relationships and light on pretty much everything else. That perhaps shouldn't be surprising given Gibson's previous works, which have been more interested in character dynamics than the setting in which they take place. Despite being initially intrigued, however, I found my interest waning towards the end of the book, as the lack of plot momentum began to take its toll.

At the start of the book, I was fascinated by the three characters, each with a different specialty of magic that captured not just their approach to magic, but to life and relationships as well. Rhys, for instance, is a sorcerer, with a focus on control through rigid spells and incantations. Moira, on the other hand, is a more empathetic caster, relying on things like tarot cards or a person's energies to figure out how to heal them. Lastly, David is a medium who specializes in channeling the dead, at once both a figure of control but also a conduit for raw emotion - raw emotion which can get extremely messy.

These three approaches make for a great set-up as the three characters work on not just breaking David's curse, but also on healing the emotional damage in their respective lives. The characters are all a little (or in one case, a lot) broken, and it's only with the help of others that they can begin to heal trauma and smooth off jagged edges. As they do so, they begin to realize that the three of them need each other, but in different ways and for different reasons.

While the emotional healing is all well and good, I did find myself frustrated at the lack of real momentum towards solving the problem at hand. Despite the curse slowly draining David, there was shockingly little urgency towards figuring out what was wrong. Days could pass between chapters, and yet there was no real sense of impending doom. Characters would go for leisurely strolls about a park, or a fight would halt all research progress for a week. The curse forced these people together, but then hung out in the background largely forgotten, as the story was focused on the characters exploring their growing and evolving feelings. It's only in the last few chapters that a real time crunch is put on the situation, and even then the resolution is somewhat underwhelming.

I think the other way this book didn't work for me was in the depiction of the Society, a secret occult group David and Rhys belong to. The Society is an occult club that supposedly offers a great deal of political power to whoever leads as High Priest. But aside from knowing that it's essentially an "old boys club," we don't really get to see the Society do anything aside from hobnobbing. Which means that when Rhys and David are competing against each other to be appointed the next High Priest, I lacked a sense of stakes or real investment in the outcome. It was simply another MacGuffin to drive a wedge between these characters.

CONCLUSION: Evocation is not a fantasy book for people who are here for magic first; it's for people looking for a relationship drama. At the end of the day, most of my issues with the book come down to the fact that I wasn't interested in what the book and the author were interested in exploring. If you just want to sink into characters confronting their feelings, working through trauma, and opening themselves up to new ways of loving, this may work for you very well. Personally, while I love character-focused books, I also usually need a plot that drives things forward as well. I need stakes, and the blasé treatment of David's curse just undercut the tension until the very end of the book. Had there been a bit more drive to the story, I think this would have worked for me immensely. Without that drive, I think that EVOCATION is a solid exploration of characters that fell just short of providing the plot thread I needed to stay engaged.