Book Review: ‘All Our Hidden Gifts’ by Caroline O’Donoghue
Full disclosure: I loved this book so this whole review is going to be praise and gushing. You have been warned.
Caroline O’Donoghue hit it out of the park with her debut YA novel about friendship, tarot, magic and found family.
“Maeve Chambers doesn’t have much going for her. Not only does she feel like the sole idiot in a family of geniuses, she managed to drive away her best friend Lily a year ago. But when she finds a pack of dusty old tarot cards at school, and begins to give scarily accurate readings to the girls in her class, she realizes she’s found her gift at last. Things are looking up – until she discovers a strange card in the deck that definitely shouldn’t be there. And two days after she convinces her ex-best friend to have a reading, Lily disappears.
Can Maeve, her new friend Fiona and Lily’s brother Roe find her? And will Maeve’s new gift be enough to bring Lily back, before she’s gone for good?”
I love reading about magic, witches, tarot and new age spirituality, but it’s not really something I have much experience with. My nan believed in angels, the power of crystals, attended spiritual healing sessions and evenings with mediums, and I went along with her to various events events, but I was too young to really understand what that meant. Now she’s gone I don’t really have any exposure to it, having lost so many people I love it makes me a little anxious to think about it in the context of myself. I do, however, love exploring it a little more through fiction what that safety net and distance of fiction.
Maeve stumbles upon magic and tarot completely by accident and at first she doesn’t really understand the power that she wields. I really loved watching her uncover her talent and revel in it in a way that she’s never done before; she’s never truly excelled at anything before tarot. It’s not like she’s immediately a magical hero either. It’s this new power that catapults her into chaos and propels the novel. O’Donoghue doesn’t sugar coat her characters and how Maeve’s dive into magic begins to unravel her life. She lets them be mean, say the wrong thing, act on impulse or anger, and it’s never without consequence, but it also never makes them a bad person. It just makes them people.
One of the big topics discussed in ‘All Our Hidden Gifts’ is the conservative war on difference, whether that be race, religion, sexuality or gender identity, and it hit hard in the current climate. Characters of all identities feature in the novel and as the tension builds around rescuing Lily and the involvement of the Children of Brigid, so does the pressure exerted on Maeve to face up to her privilege to be ignorance of the things that her friends, her sister, her classmates face every single day for having dark skin or not adhering to the gender binary. I’ve rarely seen a character realise and acknowledge their privilege on the page and then work towards being a better ally. It’s a powerful statement and one that’s not present nearly enough.
I was completely bewitched by this book and raced through it at breakneck pace. Acceptance and friendship are tackled deftly and with a hefty dose of magic and mysticism.
Written by Sophie
