Lia and Beckett's Abracadabra by Amy Noelle Parks
Lia’s grandma sets up a magic contest in Mirror Lake. The winner gets the Starlight Theater. Lia partners with Beckett. All tricks must come from Grandma’s original shows. While preparing, Lia learns the secrets of Grandma’s performances. YA romance.
Since magic has declined in popularity, the Mirror Lake magicians have resorted to using their skills to con tourists, sometimes for thousands of dollars. Even when the stakes were lower, the tourists might lose their bus fare and food money. Elliott took revealing pictures of Lia’s sister Emma and released them on social media. Montgomery girls do not get along with the Blackwell boys. This traces back to when Grandma Montgomery was the assistant for Henry Blackwell’s magic act. Fifty years ago. Lia hopes to address all these issues and win the contest.
Romance: As the book opens, Lia's short romance with her latest boyfriend [we’ve spent most weekends together, and I’ve lost a bobby pin or two—although nothing of importance—in the back seat of his car] ends because he wrote a poem to her mother. She’s had a lot of boyfriends, but when she meets Beckett, she doesn’t kiss him…which is unusual. She does kiss his cousin Chase. This upsets Beckett even though he has told her he only wants to be friends. Against Lia's desires, they agree not to kiss until after the contest. Lia finds this difficult, but she sticks with it.
The author is a math teacher and uses math in her books. In a later book, The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss, she explains that she didn’t follow the math rigorously. The compromise was for the purpose of making the book accessible to all readers. She did something similar here, but without an apology. Her De Bruijn sequence trick was only sufficient for 32 cards, not a full deck as suggested. The internet has an easier version of this trick with a 48-card deck. That is easier to perform, but harder to explain.
The book mentions several famous women. Christabel Pankhurst. Matilda Joslyn Gage.
The author’s books deal with kissing and women in STEM.
“Wearing lipstick doesn’t
actually interfere with my ability to have a complicated thought.”
“This
being-friends-with-someone-you-want-to-kiss thing is still pretty new to me.”
“But I’m tired of
this—people believing I don’t have a single brain cell in my head because I’m a
cheerleader and I paint my nails and I like music people have actually heard
of. I get talked over in calculus and asked if I’m in the right place when I
show up at math camps and cross-examined about cheating when I ace physics
labs.”
Final note: Frozen custard is pretty much the best thing about living in Wisconsin.
Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cat Press books and book recommendations.
