The Omicron Variant sounds like a trashy SF film but since it happens to be real, 2022 is getting off to a rather dismal start. Cheering people up is still the priority so I’ve decided to recommend something light and funny. My current top pick for entertainment value is Australian author Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Teacup Magic trilogy. These three novellas: Tea and Sympathetic Magic (2018), The Frost Fair Affair (2020) and Spellcracker’s Honeymoon (2021) are easy to get in paperback or as ebooks.

All three stories are set in the Teacup Isles during the reign of Queen Aud and feature Mnemosyne (Mneme) Seabourne, an intellectual young woman from a powerful magical family, and professional Spellcracker, Charles Thornbury. At the start of Tea and Sympathetic Magic, Mneme is feeling bored at her fourteenth garden party of the Season even though `cakes and conversation were her favourite things’. She is fed up with husband-hunting at balls and croquet games and would `much rather be at home in her father’s library with a cup of tea and a book.’ Mneme’s embarrassing mother insists that she attends a house party being held by her cousin, Henry Jupiter, the Duke of Storm. The almost handsome Duke is the greatest prize in the marriage market but Mneme has always found boisterous Henry annoying and has no intention of marrying him.

Mneme is one of five eligible ladies invited to the Duke’s country house on the Isle of Storm. On the first evening Mneme is shocked to find a strange man in her bedroom. This turns out to be Charles Thornbury carrying out his job of protecting the Duke against love charms. Charles has `spent most of his professional life being disappointed by the behaviour of refined ladies’ and has already found the paraphenalia needed to work coercive love spells in the bedrooms of the other four ladies. He is surprised to discover that Mneme doesn’t want to marry the Duke and reluctantly accepts her as an ally. Before the Duke can choose between his suitors, he is mysteriously abducted and Charles finds himself up against some very formidable female magic. Can Mneme persuade the rival suitors to work together and break the rules of polite behaviour in order to save the Duke from a most unsuitable marriage?

Humorous Fantasy is a tricky thing to recommend because humour is so much a matter of personal taste. I can only say that I find Rayner Roberts work amusing because there is charming humour in her plots, in the details of her invented world and in the style in which the Teacup Magic stories are written. In Tea and Sympathetic Magic a standard plot element from Regency Romantic Fiction – a heroine abducted or tricked into an elopement by a dastardly suitor – is refreashed by a gender swap, so it is a burly male who is going to be forced into marriage by a ruthless older woman while the young women lead the rescue party.

Set in a kind of alternative early Victorian world with added magic and some liberal laws which allow an interesting range of romantic possibilities, these novellas are crammed with delightful details. Gentlemen can get between the Teacup Isles via convenient portal magic but ladies have to travel in antiquated swan-shaped boats or lace-edged peacock carriages. Croquet is a vicious game at the best of times but becomes even more exciting when players are allowed to use any `form of magic appropriate for mixed company’. Mneme finds herself playing with a ball that alternates between being a rolled-up hedgehog and a grass-covered coconut macaroon. Everyone loves a wedding but probably not one where malignant poppets are hidden in jellies and junkets and the massive iced cake has been used for a most nefarious purpose.

Few writers of Regency Romances can successfully emulate the literary style of Georgette Heyer, let alone Jane Austen but Rayner Roberts writes with wit and elegance. Her dialogue sparkles and her prose is full of striking sentences that deserve to be read aloud, such as: It is true that a single hedgehog can do little in the face of awful and overwhelming power , but a hedgehog thrown in the right moment can be a call to arms – a declaration of chaos, like a cream bun hurled across a cafeteria, or a bridal bouquet tossed into a mob of hungry maidens. There is always a pleasing sharpness to Rayner Roberts’ observations. If Tea and Sympathetic Magic was a cake it would be a very good Lemon Drizzle Cake.

The tone changes slightly in the second two novellas which play with elements of Crime and Spy fiction. In The Frost Fair Affair, Mneme is wintering in the capital of the Teacup Isles with Henry and his new Duchess (chosen for her robust sense of humour). There is social satire as Mneme campaigns for women to be allowed to use magical portals. Mneme makes a startling discovery about what Duke Henry and Spellcracker Charles are really up to in the capital and finds herself facing an infamous murderer armed only with a teapot. In Spellcracker’s Honeymoon, Mneme and Charles are visiting the only one of the Teacup Isles on which magic is not supposed to work but there seems to be a monster on the loose and they have a masked ball to attend and a murder in the Queen’s household to solve.

Bookish Mneme with her acid tongue and warm heart is very much my kind of heroine and Charles is an attractive hero with interesting secrets in his past. So, if you are still not-going-out, or your spirits need a lift, why not let the magical adventures of this pair entertain you? Until next month…