Italian-American folk magic sounded really interesting

By Dana Corby

Living Folk Magic: Crafting Your Own Magical Life

Mary-Grace Fahrun

RedWheel/Weiser, 2025

$18.95 USD

Disclaimer: I was given a copy of this book in exchange for reviewing it.

I thought a book about Italian-American folk magic sounded really interesting so I happily agreed to review it. I found myself, instead, confused and irritated. Here’s why:

I’ll start with something that doesn’t get mentioned much in book reviews but probably should – the actual book. Not the cover; it’s lovely. The interior. The body text of this book was printed in a heavily-serifed font called Adobe Mrs. Eaves at only 10-point size. My old eyes struggled with it. Which may be part of why I had so much trouble making heads or tails of what author Fahrun was trying to say. Maybe Weiser was trying to save money on paper by printing it in such a small font? It’s 208 pages even at this size, so…

But that’s not the only reason I had trouble understanding the book. It’s poorly organized, rambling, and inconsistent. Most of it is in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that sometimes fitted the heading it was under but more often didn’t. The heading styles themselves didn’t seem to follow consistent levels. Most of the time information was in paragraph style with information on the topic tangled among personal anecdotes, making it hard for me to get the author’s point. But once in a while there’d be a list. Sometimes the list was numbered, sometimes each item started with capitalized keywords, sometimes only the fact that each “paragraph” was only a sentence or two indicated that this was a list, and sometimes the list was bulleted. The bullets weren’t always the same style and I couldn’t figure out what that meant. All this made it impossible for me to follow a train of thought.

Not that there was nothing of value here; there is. I was brought up short by a deeply insightful list on page 96 of things magical practitioners should ask themselves about what they really believe about themselves and their practice. Chapter 8, Common Folk Magic Spells from Around the World, which I have to assume was the “Book of Shadows” the author mentioned in her Introduction as being included in the book, was interesting and broken out in a way that made it possible for me to understand it. I only wish the author had done this with the topic the book was supposed to be about, Italian-American folk-magic. All that was just buried in chatter.

I think Living Folk Magic is a solid third draft of what could have been a fascinating book. If it had been properly edited a lot of rambling and repetition would have been eliminated and then it could have been typeset at a readable size.