Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic historical fiction!!
Review: With two delightful correspondents, presented as a series of letters between the cousins Kate and Cecilia, this book was delicious.
Having just finished reading it, I feel enervated & gleeful - it's one of those, the kind that make you crow with delight over particularly good passages and happy summations.
And sum it up I shall:
Kate is in London for the Season (an alternate London, where magic is accepted and wizardry employed in defence of the Regent's residence and we have the usual references to Regency London, Lady Jersey and the Duke of Wellington and so on) and Cecelia is stuck in the country after a particularly hairy incident involving a goat.
Both characters are delicious and get involved in some very intriguing business, with an unavoidably attractive debutante, some magic spells, and a disdainful Marquis. Not to mention a vindictively vicious Stepmother!
The story is charming, and even more interesting, at the end in a series of postscripts from the authors, they reveal that the book was written in a game,AS A SERIES OF LETTERS (just as presented in the book)without discussing the plot, the characters, or anything further to the construction of the next letter. A bit like that game where you add on the next sentence, but they have created a marvellous world.
As P.C. Wrede started the first letter, it is based on her Mairelon the Magician books, which were also set in a magic-infused Regency England. What fun! Can't wait to read the next one.