Gifted & Talented

In a near-future world where commercialized electromagnetic energy, known as Magic™, powers a vast technomantic industry of technology driven by magic, three adult siblings face a week of cascading crises after the sudden death of their father, Thayer Wren, founder of Wrenfare Magitech.

The novel opens on a Monday. Meredith Wren, the eldest sibling and CEO of Birdsong, delivers a tech talk at Tyche Inc., Wrenfare's chief rival, about her flagship product, Chirp, a biomantic device that uses magic to alter brain chemistry, marketed as an app that can make users happy. She ignores calls from her father's assistant, Dzhuliya Aguilar, and receives a threatening text from her ex-boyfriend, journalist Jamie Ammar: "I know what you did. And I'm going to publish it" (3). Her younger brother Arthur Wren, a U.S. congressman from California, attends a London masquerade hosted by his lovers, Lady Philippa Villiers-DeMagnon and racecar driver Yves Reza. Arthur hides an uncontrolled form of electrokinesis, the ability to manipulate electricity. At the party, a pill from Yves causes a chandelier to explode, and Arthur makes the lights dance on purpose for the first time in over a decade. The youngest sibling, Eilidh Wren, a former ballet prodigy whose career ended with a spinal injury five years earlier, is aboard a plummeting airplane. She harbors a parasitic entity in her chest that offers to save the plane if she surrenders control. She agrees; the plane stabilizes, but a plague of locusts engulfs the aircraft. Biblical-scale catastrophes have followed Eilidh since her injury.

All three learn of Thayer's fatal stroke that Monday but fail to answer calls in time. Meredith confronts Jamie, who explains Chirp's real function: When users wearing the device enter a Tyche-owned store, it pushes serotonin regardless of their mood, conditioning happiness to drive purchases rather than treating mental illness. A flashback reveals that during clinical trials five years earlier, Meredith used her own magical ability, a form of mind-alteration learned in childhood, to rewrite each trial patient's brain chemistry when results proved marginal. Her CTO, Ward Varela, became her reluctant accomplice, cutting the cameras. The fraud underpinned Tyche's ten-billion-dollar valuation of Chirp.

An omniscient narrator provides essential context. Magic™ was first commercialized around 1890 and later scaled by Thayer into Wrenfare. Alongside corporate magic, individual folkloric magic genuinely exists: Meredith can alter minds, Arthur has electrokinesis, and Eilidh hosts something akin to a demon that produces biblical plagues. Thayer's final social media post reads: "I've learned to expect the least out of the people I thought the highest of" (45).

Monday evening, the siblings converge at the family home in Mill Valley. Meredith has brought Jamie from Los Angeles, ostensibly to tell her side of the story. Arthur arrives with his wife, Gillian, a doctoral student whom he married for political convenience rather than passion. As the siblings linger outside, Arthur collapses and dies. Meredith performs CPR; after a desperate struggle, Arthur gasps back to life amid a shower of sparks.

Tuesday, two lawyers arrive with conflicting wills; a judge must determine which is valid. Yves offers Gillian a piece of his medicinal chocolate, which contains mild intoxicants she is unaware of. On a hike, Eilidh suppresses a growing attraction to Dzhuliya, complicated by a prior aborted sexual encounter between them. Meredith and Arthur mention Lou, their estranged childhood friend. A narrative interlude reveals Lou's backstory: Maria Odesa Guadalupe de Léon grew up poor in Marin County, raised by her mother and two grandmothers, one Filipino and one Guatemalan, both folkloric magic practitioners who taught Lou, who in turn taught Meredith. Their friendship fractured when Meredith became obsessed with rewriting brain chemistry, inspired by her mother's death from complications of a long eating disorder, and Lou objected to the ethics. Meredith had Lou expelled by exposing essays Lou had ghostwritten to afford basic necessities. That evening, Arthur dies a second time and revives amid sparks. Meredith concludes Lou is the only person who might understand their magical malfunctions.

Wednesday, the siblings trace Lou to a modest house in El Cerrito, where Arthur recognizes a woman with a toddler as Lou. She is hostile toward Meredith but softened by Eilidh's confession of accidentally causing apocalypses, and she agrees to consider helping. Lou then reveals herself as the "voice of God" narrator who has been telling the story all along. That evening, Meredith's boyfriend, Cass Mizuno, proposes marriage; she tentatively accepts. Jamie tells her his article will run in the New York Times. Over drinks, Meredith confesses she committed fraud out of terror of failure; Jamie says he loves her but will still publish. Eilidh and Dzhuliya sleep together for the first time. Separately, Gillian, guided through gentle intimacy exercises by Yves, realizes she is deeply in love with Arthur. When Philippa claims to be pregnant with Arthur's child, Gillian calls the bluff, and Philippa admits the lie.

Thursday morning, Eilidh learns from a funeral director that Thayer considered Meredith the child he truly trusted, while Eilidh was merely easier to love because she never challenged him. Shattered, the entity in her chest responds by blotting out the sun globally. Lou and Arthur hike in Muir Woods, where Lou diagnoses his problem as emotional: His relationships are dishonest, and his magic cannot function in such disarray. Arthur finally screams, "I just wanted my dad to love me, and now he never will" (347). Meredith and Jamie reach their own resolution when he offers to pull his name from the article and she refuses, accepting the consequences. She also learns from Tyche's CEO that Wrenfare is financially collapsing because Thayer had been secretly funding it himself, and she suspects he left her the company expecting her to bear the blame.

That afternoon, Philippa is struck by a car in the darkness and killed. Arthur grieves for her and for Riot, the imaginary daughter he had hoped to have with Philippa. The lawyers deliver the will: Thayer left his Wrenfare shares to Meredith, with personal assets split among the three siblings and the unborn child of Thayer and Dzhuliya. The revelation of Thayer's affair with his assistant devastates Eilidh, whose anguished cry unleashes a plague of flies that Arthur's electrokinesis ignites, burning part of the house. Afterward, Arthur and Gillian confess their love. They discover the likely cause of Arthur's repeated deaths: He has been taking massive overdoses of Yves's intoxicant-laced chocolate, unable to convert the dosage from its Turkish label. Arthur, Gillian, and Yves agree to build an unconventional but honest life together.

Friday, the funeral takes place in the redwoods under Eilidh's darkness. Meredith admits publicly that her father never liked her; Arthur acknowledges the same. Eilidh, locking eyes with Lou, begins to dance for the first time since her injury, channeling grief into motion. The entity responds, and the sun returns. Meredith breaks off her engagement with Cass and, in Lou's car, offers Lou control of Wrenfare as reparations for derailing her career. Lou accepts, proposing to rebuild around legitimate neuromantic research, the application of mind-altering magic to mental health. She agrees to hold a job for Meredith after her prison sentence.

The novel closes with the siblings in their father's scorched office. Meredith reveals she secretly attended every one of Eilidh's ballet performances; Eilidh calls her a genius. Arthur says he will probably lose his election, then try fostering or adoption. Eilidh addresses her father: "You weren't very good at this. But I love you" (487). Lou drives home, rocks her son to sleep, and savors happiness as "not a state of being but a collection of moments, all strung up like fairy lights over a sleeping child's face" (491), before texting Meredith that she is on her way back for pizza.