The first exchange of letters is about a pen. Aidric Dawson sends Mira Winters a scroll arranging their next meeting and adds a smug postscript praising enchanted ink, which writes for you before your fingers move. Mira answers by rolling up her plain fountain pen from the non-magical town where she has been hiding, and sending the pen itself flying at his head. His reply accuses her of resorting to violence in an academic debate. Her next letter, a formal defence of ordinary ink, is signed with the cheapest pen she owns, purely because it annoys him. Our Dark Incantations by Wanda Hellmund is a novel about grief, poison and murder, yet this small skirmish of stationery is where its two leads first become people to each other, and it is a fair sign of what the book does best.
The story, out now, follows Mira into a famous university of magic after a war that took her parents and left her arm scarred. A test at the gates places her among the practitioners of destructive magic she has spent years fearing, and a Highmage with a bargain in mind attaches her to Dawson’s secret inquiry into a run of suspicious deaths.
The inquiry gives the opening chapters a satisfying procedural rhythm. Mira works at night in a borrowed laboratory, testing blood that should not still be available to test, while her new partner reads in the corner and pretends not to watch. The early chapters set out their clues cleanly and let a quiet, competent woman be the one who cracks the first of them.
A Survivor Nobody Asked to Get Better
What separates this novel from most of its shelf neighbours is how seriously it treats aftermath. Mira does not have a tragic past that is mentioned and filed away. She has nightmares that replay one afternoon, a hand that goes to her sleeve whenever a room gets crowded, and healers who have spent years telling her the pain is in her head. Her best friend Ella loves her and wants the old Mira back, which is exactly the problem. One of the sharpest sequences comes at a school ball, where Mira drinks a happiness potion so she can perform cheerfulness for an evening, and the hour after it wears off is written with a bleak precision that anyone familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder will recognise.
Our Dark Incantations by Wanda Hellmund refuses to side with the dismissive voices, and its patience with Mira’s pain is the source of its strongest chapters.
Hellmund’s prose is plain and quick, given more to short, stabbing sentences than to atmosphere, though the university itself, a rebuilt fortress that quietly reshapes its corridors around what each student wants, is a lovely gothic idea. The supporting cast is warm. Ella is relentlessly kind and occasionally exhausting, which is honest. Rylan, a cheerful researcher who doubles as a campus potion dealer and lives by the motto that failure is progress, is the book’s most likeable creation. Oliver, Ella’s earnest boyfriend, gets one of the funniest moments in the novel when he walks into his own office at the wrong time.
What Our Dark Incantations Asks of a Hero
They meet in a cellar club beneath a ruined citadel, at two in the morning, when Mira is trying to buy a narcotic from the one man in the room least willing to sell. He makes her play a drinking game built around magic just so he can find out whether she refuses to use hers or simply cannot. It is a smart introduction, because it establishes that he reads her better than anyone else in the novel, and that he enjoys doing it. Much of the early pleasure of Our Dark Incantations by Wanda Hellmund lies in that sparring, which is quick, petty and often genuinely funny, with both of them keeping score.
Dawson himself is a familiar figure: silver hair, a fortune, a scarred body, a cruel wit, and a past nobody will discuss. Hellmund gives him real pathos as the secrets come out, and the scenes where he talks Mira through a panic attack are tender. The prose around the lovers is heated and the sex is explicit and frequent, which will please the book’s intended readers.
The difficulty is that the novel admires his control more than it questions it. Early on he wipes two students’ memories to protect his secrets, casually and expertly, and the story registers Mira’s horror without ever quite making it matter. That habit of deciding what other people get to know returns later in a form that is meant to be romantic and reads as something closer to coercion. A morally grey hero is a fine thing; a book that never asks him to answer for the grey is a weaker one. Our Dark Incantations by Wanda Hellmund would be braver if Mira held that line as firmly as she holds her ground in their arguments.
Our Dark Incantations and the Weight of Its Back Half
The second half has strengths: a sentient old house that slowly decides to like Mira is a charming invention, and the stakes widen without losing sight of the scar. But a few problems pile up:
Mira’s refrain that everything is her fault recurs so often that it stops wounding and starts to read as filler.
A grave act late in the novel is tidied away by a cover-up, with little moral cost to anyone involved.
The story keeps finding one more crisis after it seems to have ended, and the length starts to tell.
None of this sinks Our Dark Incantations by Wanda Hellmund, but together these flaws keep a promising book from being a remarkable one.
The Writer Behind Ivercrest
Wanda Hellmund grew up in Germany, where she was writing her first murder mystery by the fourth grade, and she now lives in Southern California. In the acknowledgments she explains that she began the novel while working through post-traumatic stress of her own, which goes a long way to explaining why Mira’s symptoms feel observed rather than borrowed. The debut has been published in several territories at once, by Ace in the United States, Headline in Britain and LYX in Germany, a measure of how much faith publishers placed in it before a single reader had opened it.
That background matters because Our Dark Incantations by Wanda Hellmund is at its most convincing when it slows down to sit with a frightened woman in a dark room. The fantasy machinery is competent; the attention to recovery is the part that feels personal.
Where It Leaves You
Readers who loved the vampire politics and slow-burning devotion of The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent will find a similar dangerous protector here, and the silver-haired menace and explicit heat of Quicksilver by Callie Hart are an even closer match. For a heroine whose grief drives her into a secret magical world on campus, Legendborn by Tracy Deonn makes a thoughtful companion.
Our Dark Incantations by Wanda Hellmund is uneven, overlong and too fond of its hero, yet its best chapters understand something many romantasies skip: surviving is not the same as being well. That insight, and a war fought in ink, are what readers will carry away.