GIFTED & TALENTED

Magic can’t solve the problems of this incredibly dysfunctional family.

As teenagers, Meredith, Arthur, and Eilidh Wren seemed poised for glorious futures. Now as the three approach 30, that promise seems to have gone a bit sour. A former lover is about to publish an article exposing prickly tech mogul Meredith as a fraud: She used magic to fake positive test results for a splashy new device which purportedly adjusts your brain chemistry to make you happy. Arthur, the country’s youngest congressman, watches his political fortunes tank while he juggles a complex love life that includes a devoted but apparently asexual wife as well as active participation in a pleasure-seeking throuple with a British aristocrat and a French race car driver. And lonely Eilidh mourns the glittering ballet career she lost five years ago to a car accident that injured her back, secretly pines for her father’s executive assistant, Dzhuliya, and worries about a secret ability that mimics the ten plagues. The three estranged siblings are forced to reckon with their past—and their future—when their domineering father, founder of the powerful corporation Wrenfare Magitech, suddenly dies. Blake has previously specialized in writing about brilliant, unpleasantly self-involved people; in this book, her apparently semiomniscient narrator actually comes straight out and tells you that all the Wrens are assholes. When the narrator’s identity is revealed (not that it was hard to figure out), it becomes clear that their opinions on the siblings are murkier than they previously admitted; but that might not do much to change the reader’s opinion as to whether there’s anything likable or indeed, relatable, about the Wrens. The author claims inspiration from Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums. She is clearly trying to establish the Wrens as Anderson types, charmingly quirky failures who have difficulty saying what they feel, struggling under the weight of expectations not fulfilled. Anderson’s cinematic world is contrived and artificial, existing in a sidestep from our reality; however, he can generally make his odd characters seem genuine. But Blake’s strange bundles of traits never quite coalesce as believable people.

Blake is gifted at attaining bestseller status; ascertaining her talent for authentic drama is more difficult.