The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones: A Novel by Lex Croucher
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Nonbinary MC, secondary Black character, secondary bisexual character, bi/pansexual love interest
Protagonist Age: 17
PoV: Third-person, present-tense
Published on: 9th June 2026
ISBN: 0063460238
Goodreads

Casey McQuiston meets The Secret History in this unmissable dark academia fantasy from New York Times bestselling author Lex Croucher following former childhood best friends who reunite at magical boarding school after years, only to find themselves enemies on opposite sides of the ugly secrets hidden within the gilded walls.

Welcome to the Temple School of Thaumaturgy ... and your newest dark academia obsession.

For as long as they can remember, Briar Jones dreamed of attending the Temple School of Thaumaturgy. Behind its looming ornate gates, the elite prep school—the place that has produced the most CEOs and Prime Ministers in British history—is whispered to be magical. 

Briar's best friend, Sebastian Wolfe, never cared about Temple or believed in the rumors. He just wanted them to stay together forever. 

When, at age 11, Seb gets an acceptance letter and Briar doesn't, their childhood friendship is shattered. Seb vanishes onto Temple's grounds and Briar resigns themself to a mundane life. But they can't completely forget their yearning for Temple, for the extraordinary, to be one of the chosen in the ivory tower. 

Seven years later, a summer job advert a temp position sorting through the junk in Temple’s attics. Briar takes it. And they discover that quiet, sensitive Seb, the boy they once loved more than anything else in the world, has become a beautiful, arrogant villain feared by most of the school. And worse, the secrets Temple is hiding might not be so magical after all, but a dark conspiracy with implications that extend far beyond the gates. 

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~spaghetti is not a vegetable
~magic’s messed-up but the problem is Eton
~A++ nonbinary rep
~when you’re sure you know where this story’s going: no you don’t
~no one is doomed by this narrative

I finished this in a single day. A single day in which I had an 8-hour migraine. Really, I should just stop talking now, because doesn’t that tell you everything you could possibly need to know??? That’s how compulsively readable it is; that I couldn’t put it down, even while in stupid amounts of pain. MEGA POINTS FOR CROUCHER.

But if you still want an actual review…well, all right then.

The very first thing I want to say is: THANK YOU, Lex Croucher. While this is not the very first time I’ve seen an author completely avoid outing a nobinary protagonist’s biological sex, it is the first time I’ve seen an author manage it even with on-page sex scenes, and I am so very grateful. I am so sick and tired of authors making sure the audience knows what gender their enby was assigned at birth, like that’s information we need to know. We have no idea what’s under Briar’s clothes, and I love it. I want all the allies to sit up and take notes on what Croucher’s done here. I’m not even sure most cis readers will notice, that’s how smoothly, brilliantly, Croucher’s written it, how natural they’ve made the absence of that information. But this nonbinary reader very much noticed, and was thrilled and validated and appreciated it SO INCREDIBLY MUCH.

So. THANK YOU, Lex Croucher!

Story-wise, TULoBJ had me completely unable to predict where we were going. The description on the back of the book clearly wants you to expect everything will go This Way, but almost as soon as Briar has reached the magic school, Croucher deflates those expectations mercilessly. (I am not exaggerating: it is brutal and gutting and excellent.) Up until the final chapters, I had no idea how the book was going to end; for a good long time, I was very nervous that the focus on Stopping The Bullies was going to be the whole of it, that the bullies would be stopped and the book would portray that as a triumph…while leaving the institutionalised evil functionally unchanged. That would not have been a happy ending, by my standards.

I really should have trusted Croucher more. In my defence, this is my first time reading a book of theirs!

You’re going to feel like such an idiot when you don’t know what to say to the vampire without his top on.’

‘Sir, please put some clothes on, this is a school for children.’

TULoBJ is being described as dark academia. Your mileage will vary depending on how you define ‘dark academia’; personally, I think this is much more of a ‘look how fucked-up magic!Eton is, and also Great Britain as an institution’ kind of story. (If that fits your definition, then woo!) The magic here is a pretty obvious metaphor for worldly power, especially generational wealth, and the things it’s good for also align with that – magic is primarily for controlling other people, manipulating them in one way or another. And so TULoBJ is less about the obsessive hunting after knowledge – my own definition of dark academia – and more about how that knowledge is used, specifically how it is used in terrible ways by terrible people. In fact, it’s hard to see how any of this magic could be used for good; every spell overwrites the free will of the person it’s used on – that’s literally what the magic taught at this school is for. Maaaybe you could use the removing-memories magic for helping people with trauma; maybe you could, in an emergency, mind-whammy a panicked crowd to get them to evacuate a burning building or something. But that’s about it. And given that the vast majority of the students are going into things like politics and law, it’s a safe bet that they do not plan on confining themselves to healing trauma and/or emergencies where lives are at stake.

(Our first hint that Briar is not a clear-cut hero is that even as they learn about how horrifying magic actually is – they still want it. They feel guilty about this, but that doesn’t change how they feel. I didn’t question this while I was reading, but now I think it was Croucher laying the groundwork for Briar being a more complicated character than they seem at first.)

In fact, over the course of the book, Briar (and thus the reader) learn that graduates of the academy are kind of the foundation of British politics. Besides being a darkly hilarious explanation as to why so many complete tossers keep getting voted into the English parliament, this also raises questions about Britain’s colonial period. How long has Britain/England been weaponising magic against the rest of the world? It would help explain some of the things they accomplished, wouldn’t it?

In more ways than the obvious, because it is almost instantly clear that magic!Eton is deliberately creating monstrous people. The kind of people who would do what England has historically done (and continues to do in too many ways). If you know anything about the history of British boarding schools, particularly all-boys’ ones, you are probably aware that there is a long tradition of horrific abuse endemic to the system, less teachers abusing students (though I’m sure that happened too) than students abusing other students who turn around and abuse others. This is dialled up to 11 for magic!Eton, not for shock value but as a vital part of how the school functions – and thus, how the British Empire/England’s political elite and 1% function. There are layers and layers and layers to this, many of which aren’t explicitly named on-page but which are clearly implied – TULoBJ is a book you can ‘just’ tear through and you’ll enjoy yourself immensely, but it’s also the kind of book that is immensely rewarding for any reader who likes to sit and think about what they’re reading. And what you’ll find, if you ponder this book, is that all of it fits together so beautifully. The magic may be fairly simple, but Croucher has missed nothing in exploring its ramifications; every aspect of the worldbuilding clicks together with every other so satisfyingly. Every time I considered a new implication of what was on-page, I realised Croucher was way ahead of me and had already folded it into the world of the book. I was never able to find an angle or detail that didn’t mesh perfectly with every other. I cannot express how much this kind of wickedly clever worldbuilding delights me, even when the subject matter is as horrifying as it is here!

To get back to my initial point – the institutionalised abuse at magic!Eton is a vital part of the school. Briar is horrified and disgusted, and a big chunk of the novel revolves around their teaming up with four students to stymie the ritualised efforts of the Head Bullies – a group that includes Seb, the best friend of Briar’s childhood. This is viscerally satisfying and cathartic, even as it’s also terrifying and high-stakes: Briar’s life is very much on the line in this process.

Surely nobody could be violently murdered by means of dark magic while in possession of something as mundane as a protein bar.

Despite that, at first I thought this was a very small-picture plot – stopping these particular bullies wasn’t going to fix the system. But a) trust Croucher, they have it covered, and b) this is a metaphor.

Hurt people hurt people, and this is a book intensely concerned with that idea and what we should do with it. Magic!Eton is deliberately hurting its students in order to warp them, presumably because no one who isn’t warped would go along with perpetuating this system. This means that our villains – including Seb – are themselves victims of serious, awful, long-term abuse. And one of the (so many) things I loved about TULoBJ is that it really wrestles with that, with what that means, and declines an easy answer. Just because someone hurt you doesn’t mean you can hurt others – but that you hurt others doesn’t have to mean you’re damned forever.

Interrupting the cycle of abuse, the way Briar and their sorta-friends do, is a crucial part of this. How else does someone trapped in a system like this know there are alternatives? How else do they know there is any point in trying to be better, that there are people outside the system who will accept them, even with blood on their hands, if they truly try to change? An outsider coming in to tell them so is not the only way, of course, but damn, it helps.

And even if it is not on us to tell terrible people they can change – it is on us to let them try. I am very far from the first person to point out that the political Left has a huge problem with black-and-white thinking, when instead it would be better for all of us if, when a terrible person starts to learn better, we encouraged them instead of throwing it back in their teeth. And maybe this, more than anything else, is what makes TULoBJ an Adult book rather than a YA one, because that seems to be the heart of this book’s thesis: that, just as it is an abuser’s responsibility to get better, it is the responsibility of the rest of us to let them, to give them the chance to do so. Not to forgive, necessarily, but to give them room to grow into a better person. Instead of insisting evil once is evil forever, and leaving them nowhere to stand but with the other abusers, to perpetuate the cycle unending.

This is a difficult, painful concept. As is the idea that redemption may or may not be possible, that being better going forward may never erase what you did in your past, something a number of characters have to wrestle with in TULoBJ. But equally, there’s the very clear conclusion that whether or not redemption is in the cards, you don’t have to keep being evil. You can stop, and do better, and you should. You can remake yourself. It won’t erase what you did, but it’ll stop you putting more awfulness into the world, and isn’t that worth it?

‘I’m doomed by the narrative,’ says Westby, his eyes closed, bruised-lilac eyelids fluttering like a classic heroine in the throes of a swoon.

‘You’re not doomed by the narrative,’ Tate says robotically. ‘You are hungover. Eat an egg.’

Nobody is doomed by the narrative. That shouldn’t feel so galaxy-brain, but it does.

But where I think the book trips up is View Spoiler »in how hard it works to insist that Briar and Seb/Bastian are equally terrible people. And that is, quite simply, ridiculous. Briar discovers a terrible thing in their past, but one incident – as a child, almost a decade ago, and crucially, never repeated – is not on the same level as someone who has been perpetrating horrific abuse for years. Briar’s victim was someone who had been bullying them for ages; Bastian’s victims were younger children who had never done anything to him. These things are not equal, and I was unimpressed with the attempt to make me think so.

That being said, I think it’s believable that the discovery of The Thing shook Briar badly, and that it led them to…not being sympathetic to Bastian, exactly, but being able to look at what Bastian has done and see that simply condemning it meant nothing would change.

Ultimately, Briar loves this person who has done truly horrific things. All right. I can buy that. This happens all the time in the real world. I would have preferred it be handled slightly differently, but this isn’t a dealbreaker for me. Teenagers are dumb. I think Bastian should have done a lot more apologising and grovelling before any kissing happened, and I’m not sure I could forgive him for lying back and letting someone put out a cigarette on my shoulder, but. Teenagers. I can buy it. Hormones do a lot of heavy lifting – by which I don’t mean lust, I mean how impossibly intense all emotions are during puberty. Very much including love! Love during puberty overcoming some red flags/common sense? Come on, that is absolutely a thing that really happens. It happens plenty post-puberty! « Hide Spoiler

Given all that, I have no problem believing a 17yo would make the choices Briar does. And I think that this is messy af is a big part of Croucher’s point – there was no way to make this neat and tidy, and it shouldn’t be. I will accept these very minor flaws because I love literally everything else about this book!

Not least? The way in which Croucher played me like a fiddle. They very deliberately set things up so that we expect the story to go A Certain Way. Yes, one of our major expectations is mercilessly proven wrong very quickly, but even after that, I was convinced I knew where things were going. And in hindsight, I could not be more impressed or delighted with the bait-and-switch, the red herrings that had me absolutely CONVINCED that this story was going in a perfectly predictable direction. NOPE. So. When you think you have the story figured out? No you don’t. Keep reading, and brace for the surprises. IT’S NEVER WHAT YOU THINK.

‘You look like you’re having a personal emotion.’

Which is an enormous part of what makes TULoBJ so much fun: that it is so twisty, and so thoroughly takes you by surprise. Especially because none of the surprises have that hipster-y flavour of Doing Things Differently Just To Be Different. Instead the twists are genuinely fantastic, and fit together perfectly with all the clues you missed the first time around. I just cannot stress enough how freaking CLEVER this book is, or how much I adore that about it!

And it is hysterically funny. And enraging. And heartbreaking. And – look, you’re going to want to brace for serious Feels, okay?

The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones is so much richer and more complex than it looks at first. It is a very, very fun story, but it is also deep and thoughtful and ruthlessly incisive. I couldn’t put it down despite a vicious migraine, and as should be obvious it is very hard for me to shut up about this book, even weeks and weeks after I read it! I want to write essays about it. It’s freaking brilliant. In many ways, it seems like it’s in conversation with Emily Tesh’s Incandescent, except that where Incandescent allowed for nostalgia around the idea of boarding schools and magic-as-privilege, TULoBJ wants to burn the whole system down.

And by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll want to, too.

Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »magic mind-control, torture, psychological torture, torture of children, teacher/student sexual relationship (off-page, not a main character), graphic death of a child. « Hide Spoiler

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