Brooms by Jasmine Wells & Teo DuVall
It’s 1930s Mississippi. Magic is permitted only in certain circumstances and by certain people. Unsanctioned broom racing is banned. But for those who need the money, or the thrills…it’s there to be found.
Billie Mae, captain of the Night Storms racing team, and best friend Loretta are determined to make enough money to move out west to a state that allows Black folks to legally use magic and take part in national races. Cheng-Kwan is doing her best to handle the delicate and dangerous double act of being the perfect “son” to her parents and being true to herself while racing.
The team also includes Mattie and Emma — Choctaw and Black — who are trying to dodge government officials who want to send them and their newly-surfaced powers away to boarding school. And Luella is in love with Billie Mae. Her powers were sealed away years ago after she fought back against the government. She’ll do anything to prevent the same fate for her cousins . . .
TW: Racism
Brooms hits you from the first page with vibrant illustrations, intriguing characters, and a magical take on 1930s Mississippi. Dialogue is sparse, but that allows the illustrations to shine and carry the story. The panels depicting the dangerous magical broom races are stunning and fast-paced. The lack of detail in background images allows the characters and their decisions to stand out.
In terms of world-building, Brooms packs a punch in a short book, especially for a graphic novel. Taking place in Mississippi in the 1930s, we are given references to Indian residential schools and the horrors that people faced there. One Indigenous character even loses their magical abilities as a result of the residential school, paralleling how many people who were forced into those institutions were cut off from their own heritage and the repercussions that are felt generations later. This book shows a history of oppression and doesn’t shy away from having characters discuss it.
The thing I loved most was the range of representation in Brooms. Readers will be able to find a character they connect personally with from the cast of characters. The people populating this book have different body types, ethnicities, languages, sexualities, abilities, gender identities, and more, including different magical powers! It feels like the real world (with bonus witches)!
I would give this book to a teen interested in magic, queer history, or competitive sports . This book has great representation of black and Indigenous female characters and queer relationships. A quick, beautifully illustrated read, Brooms should be an easy sell to any teen interested in graphic novels.
Movies or TV shows that would be good to watch are Amazon Prime’s A League of Their Own TV series from 2022 and The Fast and Furious film series (R).
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
After centuries of sleep, the gods are warring again. But eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow just wants to hold her family together. Her mother is suffering from addiction and her brother is missing from the front lines. Her best bet is to win the columnist promotion at the Oath Gazette.
To combat her worries, Iris writes letters to her brother and slips them beneath her wardrobe door, where they vanish—into the hands of Roman Kitt, her cold and handsome rival at the paper. When he anonymously writes Iris back, the two of them forge a connection that will follow Iris all the way to the front lines of battle: for her brother, the fate of mankind, and love.
TW: Alcoholism, war violence, death of a family member
Divine Rivals is what I would call a light fantasy. It is very similar to our own world circa the early 20th century and the onset of World War One, but the addition of divine and magical elements lends an intriguing extra layer to the setting. The once slumbering, but now awake, mythical gods have plunged ordinary people into a war tearing their country apart. All of this is revealed slowly, so readers learn new information with the characters. The world-building is vague on purpose to service one of the plot points, and it builds up at the end of the book. I would expect even more world-building from the second book in the duology.
Divine Rivals’ main character is Iris Winnow, followed closely by her rival Roman Kitt. Ross does a wonderful job creating the characters of this book, and while she sticks mainly to Iris’s perspective, we also get to see Roman’s point of view, which lends extra depth to the romance blossoming between the two. If you are a fan of the enemies-to-lovers or mistaken identity tropes, Iris and Roman’s blooming trust of each other is amazing to read. The characters are realistic and act their ages (19 and 20 respectively), and while they have ambition they also show vulnerability with each other. Iris is a refreshing character because she struggles with opening herself up and being seen as vulnerable or perceived as weak. It was wonderful to follow her as she made decisions that led to her trusting people and revealing her past. Roman is both irritating and swoon-worthy, so of course Iris falls for him before she can admit it to herself.
The writing is the real star of Divine Rivals. Both Iris and Roman are talented journalists and Roman falls in love (or at least, respect, at first) with Iris because of the quality of her writing. The language used in the novel, the inclusions of Iris’s own articles, and the letters exchanged is lyrical, evocative, and heartbreaking. Additionally, I loved that Divine Rivals is broken down into short chapters, usually fewer than 10 pages each. The chapters made it easily digestible but also made it harder to put the book down because “just one more chapter” is hard to resist when it might just be four pages.
If you hate books that end on a cliffhanger, this is not the book for you; although, the sequel Ruthless Vows was released in December 2023, so you could just check both of them out at the same time!
I would recommend this book to fans of romance and historical fiction. I would even give this to readers who want to dip their toes into fantasy but aren’t interested in long series or the complicated world-building and lore that is common in most fantasy novels.
Movies or TV shows that would be good to watch are Atonement (R), Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, and Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
Winner: Brooms by Jasmine Wells & Teo DuVall
It was hard to compare these two books. Although they both play off our own world with a hint of fantasy, Brooms‘s evocative graphic component edges out Divine Rivals. And as a stand-alone novel with an epilogue of newspaper clippings showing our heroines’ futures, the resolution of Brooms makes it a more compelling and easy read. While both books had amazing, fleshed-out characters, the cast of Brooms with its diverse representation of people and conclusion was ultimately more satisfying.
Erica Thompson (she/her) is the current High School Librarian at Prospect Heights Public Library. When not at work, you can find her walking her dog, Whiskey Biscuit, baking cookies, and starting a new run of Baldur’s Gate for the fourteenth time.
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