Thanks to NetGalley and the author for the ARC!

My nonspoilery review: There's a lot of potential in this book, in particular some really cool stuff when it comes to the worldbuilding (especially how healing magic works). With that being said, as it is with the ARC, a lot of that potential is squandered. Among the things that I believe would improve this book are a POV change (third person doesn't feel personal enough for how information is shared, and makes it confusing to decipher whether the largely contradictory information being conveyed throughout the text is factual and thus written poorly, or whether our protagonist is a bit of a moron. First person would clear that up in a jiffy.), a more dedicated approach to how people actually feel about magic/wizards, some restraint on how quickly the romance begins (as well as some reexamination on why it happens so quickly), and overall just a thorough scrubbing by a beta reader (unnecessary sentences that detract from the overall ambiance, incorrectly used words, plot development, etc.).

I love fantasy, I love gay romance, I love healing magic, and I want to love this book. Unfortunately, all of the grinding stop and starts due to the issues just kind of make it a slog to get through, with the bright points being the way magic is described and the dialogue the protagonist has with women.

After this point are my slightly spoilery train of thought notes written in real time while reading Twisted Magic, which get a little more in depth regarding my criticisms and praises of this ARC. I will not be spoiling the plot or the ending:

🧙‍♂️The writing is fairly simplistic, with cut and dry sentence structures that, unfortunately, don't possess a particularly unique tonal quality or perspective that would make the text more dynamic to read. That is to say, it doesn't feel like our MC's pov has a tone that makes these flat, uncomplicated sentences sound like a character choice, but rather that you're reading an adult book written at an elementary grade level.
🧙‍♂️"Korin ducked in and out of several different guesthouses, looking for a specific thing." This sort of telling instead of showing that has popped up quite a bit feels reminiscent of fan-translated Chinese novels, where such a language structure is more normal. It doesn't really suit an English novel written by someone who, presumably, speaks English as a first language.
🧙‍♂️"I'd of guessed fifteen." This is a pretty simple error that an editor or beta reader would have caught. And while there are examples later that suggest this is just a quirk of speech (e.g. "None a yours."), due to the clunkiness found in the rest of the book, the trust required to put in the author to accept speech quirks outright has not been built.
🧙‍♂️"He bolted the food, not wanting to keep Marta waiting." I have never seen the term "bolted" used to describe eating food quickly, and I would hazard to guess that it is not correct. Luckily, there are many other words that could apply.
🧙‍♂️I really can't go on listing every single strange choice of words, weird grammar quirks, and telling-not-showing happening here. This review would be its own novel. Suffice it to say, investing in a good beta reader or editor would be tremendously helpful, as well as a really thorough rewrite that either pumps out more dynamic sentences, or focuses on making the current simplicity of the writing more character-based.
🧙‍♂️The way the MC's healing powers work is described is incredibly cool. I loved how that first scene played out, and I'm obsessed with healing magic, so that really locked me in.
🧙‍♂️The worldbuilding when conveyed through character interactions is really good; it's a tricky needle to thread that not many authors get right, but reading it here feels really organic and informative.
🧙‍♂️One thing that feels odd that may be cleared up better later is that our MC is terrified of being found out as a wizard at first, but immediately we receive info on how prevalent wizards are in society. He freely shares info about the different orders, and we learn that at least one wizard is just a random handyman/plumber/electrician at the poorest part of town. A lot happens right away that renders the protagonist's fear of being identified totally moot. Why would he be so scared of it and then talk about it openly within 24 hours? It feels like we're supposed to believe that wizards are reviled and magic is scary, but also they have public guilds that take walk-ins for their services, and openly wear the identifiable crests of their orders. It just makes the protag's fear feel superfluous, drama for drama's sake. Yes, he came from a place where there were few, but he's had so much life experience since. Update: we do fortunately learn more about this, but at times it still feels like we leap between extremes. Like we can't decide whether wizards are considered to be Good or Bad, even though they're part of everyday life. Even their differing abilities don't really seem to matter much, just the practitioners.
🧙‍♂️I always find it an interesting choice when fantasy settings have identical foods to ours. Coffee, chocolate, guava fruit.
🧙‍♂️A particular pattern of telling instead of showing that has come up often enough to warrant a comment: [Statement of fact.][Several sentences of descriptive language showing this fact that are perfectly serviceable without the initial sentence.] This would read something like: "The house was abandoned. Ivy crept along windows long untouched. The garden around the house may have once been carefully tended, but now only dried brambles and twisting vines remained. It was impossible to tell when the chipped and sun-worn front door had last seen a fresh coat of paint." The first sentence is totally unnecessary, right? The number of paragraphs that read like this are staggering.
🧙‍♂️Naturally, the moment our quiet, wartorn shell of a protagonist meets his love interest, he transforms from wizard to rizzard.
🧙‍♂️"Shepard bless" is interesting. Given that it appears to refer to a deity, a beta reader could have pinged this as a common misspelling of "shepherd". But maybe there's just some guy our protag is swearing upon.
🧙‍♂️The instalove between our protagonist and love interest is a bit clunky. Most instalove is. I wouldn't have minded seeing this drawn out far more. Like, it's happening so quickly that it's making me think that the LI is a red herring.
🧙‍♂️I want to reiterate how weird the juxtaposition is between Magic Bad and Magic Good - just a few pages apart, MC is nearly knifed for even being suspected of showing magic by a FRIENDLY person, the love interest, and then with just a few flips of the page, we learn that a low-income inn has several magical services it pays for on the regular, including burning actual literal shit away. It just doesn't gel the way it could with more explanation, or a thorough examination of what people actually believe about magic/wizards. And like, there IS a lot of that, but then what we see just doesn't really add up. Like, you've got wizards coming around fixing the lights and incinerating the contents of the latrine, but our wizard protag fears angry mobs and violence just by walking down the street. The more I read, the more I think everything would just make more sense if the prejudice was about CERTAIN wizard groups or CERTAIN types of magic, because it just doesn't make sense as blanket prejudice if they're doing all this other mundane helpful stuff all the time to the point where they're almost like, public servants and respected tradesmen.
🧙‍♂️There's an interesting comment we get from our main character's perspective that there "aren't that many wizards in the world", but not only is he constantly seeing them out and about, like we get the impression just from his little walks about town that you can't throw a dead dog without hitting a wizard, but even in "the least populous edge of the least populated kingdom in all the world" there's still a school with double digit students. This is either nonsensical worldbuilding, or our MC is a bit of a dullard with no head for large numbers. Imagine a seasoned and apprenticed plumber peeking inside a trade school and going, "Gosh, there can't be this many plumbers in the world."
🧙‍♂️A big reason the instalove with the LI is so jarring is due to the influence it has on the protagonist. He literally calls it a "distraction" when he just spent an afternoon chatting with the guy, a circumstance that also felt sort of anticlimactic given that the way they meet had the potential to be pretty intense (in subtle paeudo-spoilery terms, the LI pulls him out of a dangerous spot, and then they flirt for two seconds and walk off to have a beer for the rest of the day). There are a lot of ways this could be tweaked so that it makes more sense; at least to me, the easiest one would be to make the MC's fixation being about the dramatic element of "being saved". But it's not, it's about the pub chat they had, and frankly very little attention is paid at all to what feels like could actually be something to develop an infatuation over. A huge missed opportunity to let fantasy be fantasy. This isn't a contemporary romance where we have to buy into one character getting an absurd crush over another just by going out and talking over a drink. He saved your life! Why aren't you even a little fixated on that?? She doesn't need to be relatable, babes, she's fantasy.
🧙‍♂️Literally a day apart, our love interest has a knife to the protagonist to warn him not to even think about using magic, and then the very next day he's helping the MC put together a giant magical ritual. This is the sort of disparity that a dedicated editor would coax rewriting from the author about.
🧙‍♂️The way magic works is unbelievably cool, 10/10 no notes.

I enjoyed this more than I thought and I think because the author kept it simple in their execution of the story.
We had great world building and a magic system that can be built more upon as more books enter the series but the ‘rules’ were clear.
I think this would be great for those wanting to start reading fantasy due to its length.

I requested this ARC with no expectations, I don't usually read novellas, but I ended up loving it so much! Could not put it down. Twisted Magic is such a sweet story, it reads as borderline cozy fantasy but has also some dark undertones and subtle social commentary. But ultimately it read as a story of love and redemption.

What I loved the most
-The love story was super cute! Korin was such a lovely MC and Ádan... I think I love him.
-The redemption story arc. Very well executed.
-The worldbuilding. The author managed to create a world with a lot of history and a cool magic system in such few pages while still mainly focusing on the characters.
-Boy, was it spicy! Caught be off-guard, but in a good way.

What I didn't like
-The author states that she has a non-traditional relationship with grammar, which I respect but do not enjoy. The prose is also quite simple and the sentence-by-sentence somewhat rough.

But then again, the novel is currently going through a last edit, so those things will likely be polished a bit.

All together, this was a great read! Didn't get boring for one second. I only wish the book would've been fleshed out, I felt like there was room for that, and I didn't want to leave the world and the characters behind so quickly. (That being said, I really respect that the author just wrote the story she wanted to wrote, how she didn't add any unnecessary fluff just to add to the page count.)
But luckily, Twisted Magic is the first in a series! The second part will be releasing in December.

Thank you so much for this ARC to NetGalley and author Barbara J. Webb.

Thank you to the author and NetGalley for sending me an ARC in exchange for a honest review.

"Twisted Magic" is the first in this series and it does a good job of setting up the setting / worldbuilding. I really like the idea of different wizard orders and the areas they cover. Something not always mentioned in these fantasy setting is what it must be like to be a commoner witnessing all this magic, how it can be amazing for the wizards but terrifying for them, which is why i am glad that this story starts to delve into this. Also i am always a sucker for MM fantasy stories.

There is a few editing / pacing issues but not enough to majorly impact the book.

I would be interested to see where this series goes and hopefully the next book continues to build off the solid foundation set by the first.

Despite the premise having loads of things I like reading about - queer protagonists in a fantasy setting, one of whom is a war veteran healer - overall the story didn’t click with me, largely because I felt it needed more polish. The author leans towards simplistic prose, which ij combination with sentence level mistakes and over-reliance on stating things, comes across as a school level writing rather than concise, economical use of language: something a thorough editing could have helped with. A lot of love went into worldbuilding, but the sentence level roughness never made me really plunge into the world; on a character level, alas - instalove, my not at all favourite character dynamic. Perhaps with less interest in nitpicking the language and more tolerance to instalove this story can be better enjoyed for what it is: a short, soft kind of fantasy romance.

Thank you to NetGalley and Victory Editing for the advance reader copy.

I enjoyed this more than I thought and I think because the author kept it simple in their execution of the story.

We had great world building and a magic system that can be built more upon as more books enter the series but the ‘rules’ were clear.

I think this would be great for those wanting to start reading fantasy due to its length.

Thank you to Netgalley, Barbara.J. Webb, and the publisher for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

This would be a great book to start with if you are looking to dip a toe into fantasy. The plot was accessible and straightforward with queer romance, a little mystery, and a lot of magic. If you are looking for a 500-600 pager with ultra detailed world building, this may not be the one for you. That being said, the amount laid out in 188 pages was impressive and did not feel lacking.

By page 2, I was in love with Korin's wholesome demeanor despite the dark past he is trying to move forward from. I am all for a story with a mysterious blight, and healing magic being the primary focus was refreshing. Korin and Adan's relationship fell flat for me at first due to a lack of tension, but it grew on me as the book progressed.

Overall, even with some dark undertones and the suspense of the blight, this book gave me the warm and fuzzies. I look forward to book #2.

this such such a heart-warming read, i had such a good time with this.

the world-building really shocked me here, it was so immersive and i could visualise it so well.

korin easily became one of my favourite characters, he was so loveable. i loved the romance in this as well - my only thing is that i wish it was a little longer to really develop the world and the plot a little more.

i did have a really good time with this though and can’t want to read more from this author!

thank you so much to netgalley, the publisher and the author for the arc 🫶🏻

Before beginning, I would just like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for giving me a copy of this book!

In all honesty, this was a pleasure to read. It felt light and enjoyable, I was able to appreciate the lovable character and warm atmosphere. Although I did really enjoy that Webb added splashes of darkness, just to make the plot and characters that bit more interesting.

For such a short novel, the world was shockingly well-developed. I do wish more time however was spent explaining certain intricacies of the world. A world map would have been an incredible help in trying to visualise certain aspects in the book. Still, most importantly, the world felt alive.

The characters themselves were great as well! Korin was simply a lovely character. Even with side characters, such as Marta, I found myself growing attached despite their limited appearance. One of my favourite aspects of fantasy is combining the fantastical with reality. When a reader somehow relates to a tale about evil trees and magical knights, that to me is a sign of an excellent fantasy author.

I just loved the relationship between Korin and Adan, both combining to be a fun mix of trauma and hope. Once more my only critique is that I wish the book was extended. There were certain moments between the two that were so adorable and I wanted as a reader to sit in those moments and savour them. I felt the same with the plot also, while I could understand it well, I think it could have benefitted slightly with more detail. Simply to add to the depth of emotions the reader can feel as the story unfolds.

Nonetheless, I genuinely adored this book. It was charming, warm and authentic. A perfect read for those who want to immerse themselves into a cute love story and enthralling plot.