Okay, I’ll admit it. Antimony’s “poor me” act grated in the beginning of the book. She believes everything happens specifically to inconvenience her, deliberate acts against her when others were just doing their jobs. This wasn’t helped by the repetition of concepts, sometimes almost word for word, that was so prevalent in the beginning even Antimony reacts to it.

Well, all I can say without spoilers is she matures big time in this book. She is twenty-two. A little old to get over “the world revolves around me” phase, but then she’s been sheltered as the baby of the family. Sheltered, that is, and trained to kill in many deadly ways…but she is a Price after all. Oh, and there’s the little detail of the potentially dangerous pyro talent she’s developed. She hides her uncontrolled flame hands from her family even when it makes an already suicidal mission even more dangerous. I wonder whether reader acceptance of Antimony depends on what role they held in their families, which is another way of saying she’s drawn realistically, I suppose. But she does grow up.

On the repetition, either it cleared up, too, or once I gave into the story, I stopped noticing it. I realized something else, though. The voice–cadence, word choice, etc.–is very much the author’s voice. It stays consistent regardless of the narrator. This is not necessarily a bad thing because it helps with the transition between main characters. Though the cadence doesn’t change, the characters’ thought processes are consistent with their personalities and perspectives, so it’s like an actor performing multiple roles. If you like the actor, you’re inclined to like the movie, but if the actor becomes someone new, it’s stellar.

Back to the book, I didn’t walk into the read with preconceptions beyond who the narrator was. If I read the blurb, it was long enough ago that I don’t remember. Everything unfolded as a surprise, something I think made the book stronger as I didn’t walk in waiting for her mission to begin.

I couldn’t help comparing Antimony to Verity (since Antimony did). I saw similarities where Antimony saw examples of how she was better than her sister. For example, Verity does ballroom dance competitions on TV heavily disguised. Antimony skates for a roller derby team as herself or close to it. Both are in the public eye, even if the derby audience is smaller, but then Antimony doesn’t disguise herself either.

Yes, I’m talking about severe sibling rivalry. It forms an underlying thread throughout the novel, but remember what I said about growing up? I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers, but I enjoyed this arc when I thought it would be the most annoying part of the book.

In keeping with the rest of the series, personhood is an important theme as well, but it takes some interesting twists in this one thanks to the Covenant involvement. Oh, and the glimpse under the Big Top and into the carnie life was wonderful. I say this as someone who has read a lot of carnival/circus books because part of me always wanted to run away and join the circus.

There’s even a complicated love story in the mix with Sam, who may have become my favorite character, though Mindy (an Aeslin mouse) might have that title. I went from finding Antimony annoying to enjoying the book enough to read Antimony’s next book (in paper even as that’s what we have).

The book offers many wonderful characters to love, hate, and even get red herringed by, but maybe the last is just the ever-hopeful me. The story puts Antimony through her paces not only physically but by challenging her to decide her own truths rather than blindly following what she’s been taught. It’s also fun and has feats of marksmanship, trampoline, and trapeze…not as separate as you might presume…so provides well-rounded entertainment on many levels.

Magic For Nothing is the sixth book in the InCryptid series by Seanan McGuire. I have listened to a few of this series on audiobook and loved them. The ones I have listened to are from Verity's or Alex's point of view, so It was nice to get another look at the Price family.

As the youngest of the three Price children, Antimony is used to people not expecting much from her. She’s been happy playing roller derby and hanging out with her cousins, leaving the globe-trotting to her older siblings while she stays at home and tries to decide what she wants to do with her life. She always knew that one day, things would have to change. She didn’t think they’d change so fast. Annie’s expectations keep getting shattered. She didn’t expect Verity to declare war on the Covenant of St. George on live television. She didn’t expect the Covenant to take her sister’s threat seriously. And she definitely didn’t expect to be packed off to London to infiltrate the Covenant from the inside…but as the only Price in her generation without a strong resemblance to the rest of the family, she’s the perfect choice to play spy. They need to know what’s coming. Their lives may depend on it. But Annie has some secrets of her own, like the fact that she’s started setting things on fire when she touches them, and has no idea how to control it. Now she’s headed halfway around the world, into the den of the enemy, where blowing her cover could get her killed. She’s pretty sure things can’t get much worse. Antimony Price is about to learn just how wrong it’s possible for one cryptozoologist to be.

Magic For Nothing is the in depth introduction to Antimony, after also seeing her through her family's eyes so far. She is just as capable as her siblings, but has her own troubles to face. She has to hide her identity to find out just what the Covenant knows, and what their plans are before there is more fall out from her sister's televised fight. Things get more and more complicated as she has to go further undercover and comes to care about the members of the show she was sent to observe. Readers get a much better understanding of Anne, and an even deeper look at the current state of the Covenant and the crypto world as it stand in the series. I loved watching Anne find her place in each of the new situations she finds herself in, and getting the explanations of how she feels with her family, and how that affected how they see her. Combined with her skills and the dangers she has to faceb made me connect with Anne in ways I did not connect with Verity or Alex. The combination of character development and introduction with the adventure and danger was extremely well done, and I cannot wait to see where Anne's story goes from here. In fact, I already have the next book in my Audible queue.

Magic For Nothing is another fantastic book from McGuire. I am eager to listen to the next book in this series, and her books are on my must read list.

Antimony Price, the youngest in the family, is sent by her family to infiltrate the Covenant of St. George, a European group who believes all supernatural creatures should be killed. They in turn, give her only a tiny amount of training before sending her back to America to infiltrate a carnival that has been the site of several disappearances. She finds herself starting a relationship with the son of the carnival owner, who is part-monkey. The coincidences in this book stretch even the flexibility of light fantasy. And I didn't find Antimony, who seems obsessed with her jealousy of her sister, quite as engaging as the other members of her family.

My thanks once again for the generosity of the publisher in making all eligible novels and short stories available for consideration to Hugo voters. I'm very grateful to have been able to experience this series and I definitely understand why it has been nominated for the Best Series award. Best of luck to Seanan McGuire in this and the other categories she is nominated in!

I adore Antimony and I'm so glad she finally gets her own book!
We finally get to see inside the big evil Covenant! And we get to see a carnival! And Antimony being awesome!

This book was amazing! I flailed so hard at it, and the ending was awesome! I can't wait to see what is in store next for Antimony.

"The sixth book in New York Times-bestselling Seanan McGuire's witty urban fantasy InCryptid series about a family of cryptozoologists who act as a buffer between humans and the magical creatures living in secret around us.

"The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book." —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Sookie Stackhouse series

Improbable, adjective:

1. Not very likely to happen; not probable.
2. Probably not a very good idea anyway.
3. See also “bad plan.”

As the youngest of the three Price children, Antimony is used to people not expecting much from her. She’s been happy playing roller derby and hanging out with her cousins, leaving the globe-trotting to her older siblings while she stays at home and tries to decide what she wants to do with her life. She always knew that one day, things would have to change. She didn’t think they’d change so fast.

Annie’s expectations keep getting shattered. She didn’t expect Verity to declare war on the Covenant of St. George on live television. She didn’t expect the Covenant to take her sister’s threat seriously. And she definitely didn’t expect to be packed off to London to infiltrate the Covenant from the inside…but as the only Price in her generation without a strong resemblance to the rest of the family, she’s the perfect choice to play spy. They need to know what’s coming. Their lives may depend on it.

But Annie has some secrets of her own, like the fact that she’s started setting things on fire when she touches them, and has no idea how to control it. Now she’s headed halfway around the world, into the den of the enemy, where blowing her cover could get her killed. She’s pretty sure things can’t get much worse.

Antimony Price is about to learn just how wrong it’s possible for one cryptozoologist to be."

New Seanan McGuire book? Yes please.

I didn't realize this was book 6 in a series, so found a lot of the story hard to follow. You definitely need to read the previous books in order to follow.

Despite my utter lack of what was going on with this story I found the writing well done and the characters interesting.

I absolutely adored this book, which was both a bit of a delightful surprise and the first step in laying a foundation of affection for everything that comes after this!

Now the spotlight moves to the youngest of the siblings these books has focused on. Antimony has been in a few short stories but this time it is her place to shine. As a result of the last book, the Covenant now knows the Price family is alive and well. Annie is asked to infiltrate the Covenant since she doesn’t look a thing like her sister and hopefully they can find out what they are planning on doing about the Price family and their Cryptid loving ways. A situation comes up that the Covenant has her work for a small carnival to find out about some missing kids. This at least brings her back to her home territory even though it isn’t near her family.
A slice of life of living in a carnival and a good progression of the overall story arc and we also get to meet Aunt Mary in this book.

Antimony Price finally has her chance to shine. Since her sister Verity outed the family on national TV by killing a giant snake and declaring war on the Covenant, Antimony is tasked with making her way to England and infiltrate the Covenant to find out their plans for North America. She makes her way there and seems to be accepted as a trainee, only to get tasked with infiltrating a carnival in North America where teenage boys have been disappearing. Lies, love, and mayhem ensue in normal McGuire fashion with plenty of carnie action. Waiting for Tricks for Free to see what happens next to poor, misunderstood Antimony!

Thanks Netgalley for the chance to read/review this title.

Antimony is my absolute favorite of the Prices. There is just something about her verve and sass that I deeply enjoyed. InCryptid is great, and I can't wait to see which Price will be front and center in the next book.

Seanan McGuire turns her attention to Antimony, the youngest of the Price siblings as she takes on the dangerous assignment of going doubly undercover - first with their dangerous enemies, the Covenant of St George, and then in a circus populated by cryptids. Antimony is a great character, and she takes center stage here as she juggles her responsibilities with her undercover life.

I love this series and really enjoyed getting Antimony's perspective. And the carnival setting, plus roller derby scenes, was awesome.

Yeah, reading these 3 books, each full length novel starring a different sibling-and Magic for Nothing being Annie's first full adventure! Well, plus their cousin's short adventure in Sleepover, which was really great, too!

Pocket Apocalypse was really awesome, given that it takes place in Australia, and learning about how the ecosystem regarding cryptids worked there was so fascinating! Plus, Alex has to juggle Shelby's family and making the cure. It also involves changing attitudes, because the group didn't even consider telling the intelligent cryptids about what was going on!

Chaos Choreography was amazing, given that Verity goes back into the dance world, and we get to actually met Grandma Alice, vs. the young Alice that we met in the short stories! I loved the mystery, and that ending, oh! That was dramatic!

Magic for Nothing was so fantastic, that Annie inherited her grandfather's gift for fire, and yeah, that was so interesting! It was another new cast of characters, andi enjoyed meeting each one, and watching their adventures!

Such an amazing series of books, and I thoroughly enjoyed them! Can't wait for Tricks for Free!

Ever since book one, I’ve been looking forward to meeting Antimony Price up close and personal. Like, of course, I want the book about the bitchy sister with the tendency to trap her siblings in deadly traps, and I just assume she’ll have the best the ship. With Magic for Nothing, the InCryptid series reaches a level of quality that has been missing since Alex took over in book three.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of the InCryptid series, but, where it starts with a bang and October Daye starts really slow, it hasn’t maintained consistent tension and quality. October Daye builds with intensity book after book, and they become more and more emotional with every single installment, because you get to know the cast better with every book. With the narrator changes every book or two and the traveling those characters are doing, by the time you’re fond of the secondary characters, you move to a new narrator or the original narrator has moved to somewhere else. This allows for a potentially pretty endless series, but it does lower the emotional investment.

Antimony wasn’t what I expected her to be almost across the board, but that’s actually one of my favorite things about her. The way that others see her versus the way she actually is makes for a really fascinating dichotomy, and it’s a reminder of how different people can be from our impressions of them. Antimony’s a badass sure, but she’s not as fierce and borderline sociopathic as her family seems to think. She’s the baby of the family, and she’s desperate to prove herself and to gain some real respect from her family. Courtesy of Verity’s idiotic stunt on live TV (it’s also really interesting to see Verity through Antimony’s eyes), Annie gets her first mission: infiltrating the Covenant of St. George.

This plot is by far the highest stakes one out of the gate since book two. Book five had high stakes but you didn’t realize that until the very end. That said, McGuire didn’t quite deliver the high octane book I was anticipating. This is both good and bad. The time at the Covenant turns out to be brief and anticlimactic, as they quickly assign her to infiltrate a carnival. The stakes raise again at the end when things go bonkers in classic McGuire style, and holy shit that ending hurt me.

My favorite part, true to form, is the chemistry between Antimony and Sam. Big surprise, when she walks into his grandmother’s carnival, he hates her, and they banter grumpily at each other. He’s also a hot, Chinese cryptid who performs on the trapeze, so like HELL TO THE YES. There hasn’t been as much diversity in this series so far, so I’m thrilled there’s finally an interracial main couple (there’s also a lesbian Price cousin in the opening chapters, and I hope she gets some focus at some point). The banter is excellent, and I’d say this is poised to be the best (and most painful) ship of the series.

That ending was cruel and now that I’m caught up, I actually have to wait AGES to read the next book. It’s pretty damn unfair. I NEED MORE SAM POSTHASTE.

<i>*ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a honest review*</i>

I have some explaining to do. Because how can I read a book and than wait SIX months to review it? Good question. Well... I wanted it to be PERFECT. I wanted it to be AMAZING. I wanted for it to be WORTHY of the excellent masterpiece I read and borrowing a line from one of my guilty readings, I needed new and better words to describe it.

Well, sadly, I didn't learn them. But, my awe for the book hasn't changed durng all this time. And revisiting the blurb, ony makes the wait for the next installment so much harder.

Anyway, if you're an Incryptid fan - and if you're not, what are you waiting for? - you know that every once in a while, we change main characters and POVs. We also get to first see the future main characters from their siblings eyes. Which causes for building an image about said characters that gets all shattered and revamped when we finally met them.

So, here we have little Antimony, which we kinda look as a spoiled brat, that stays home brooding and has her revenge putting spikes on her pit traps to make them look cooler. Which means I was all giddy with excitement to know another side of Antimony. So, imagine my surprise when she turns out to be... exactly as her siblings saw her! What? Seanan what are you doing to me? That can't be... and the mission? What type of parents send her younger daughter to the other side of the Atlantic to act as a spy? Really? Whinny and bratty Antimony? And what kind of secret organization is SO FREAKING EASY TO FIND AND ENTER?! Those were the concepts we learn from the synopsis and that the author actually feds to us when we start the book.... And then the story continues and...

Okay, so six months passed, so this is what I recall:

1) The Covenant is SCARY as HELL
2) We should not EVER doubt Seanan McGuire. NEVER.
3) Antimony is my favorite character/Sibling.
4) Aisling Mice are da best, and I would want a colony of my own, but sadly my cats disagree with me
5) This series is freaking amazing and the previous five were just a sample of the awesomeness we had in store...
6) This book destroyed me. Al this time and I can still remember every twist, every expression, every painful thing that was said, and written that happened... My heart breaks all over again, my outrageous voice sounds and my need for the next one is as strong as it was when I first read it.

Is it March yet?

McGuire has the singular talent
to keep a series running for years
but every book is
fresh and captivating.
The newest INCRYPTID
novel is no exception.
Exciting and clever
with her ever present
dark humor McGuire
ramps up the threat to the Price family
when Antimony is sent undercover
with The Covenant.
Fanatics who hate anything not human.
The very creatures the Price's have
been fighting to save.
Can Antimony save the intended victims
from The Covenant with out blowing her cover?
Or dying?

Seanan McGuire is one of the most prolific and inventive fantasy authors today. I have no excuse for not having read any of the previous "Incryptid" novels, and found to my delight that I could pick up this one, in the middle, and enjoy it fully. I'll be on the lookout for subsequent -- and previous -- books set in this colorful, complex world.

Great story, but I was a little lost not having read the books before this one. Still enjoyed the story and chartacters.