Lydia Polk is only sixteen years old but Isadora Goode, her mentor of two weeks, takes her to see the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. It's 1940, so that's Winston Churchill and he's a wartime leader. Isadora is the grand mistress of the Royal Academy of Witches and she's there to tell her old friend that she's ready to offer its not insubstantial aid in defeating the evil on the continent, led by Adolf Hitler. Lydia has to watch surreptitiously, through her talent of projection, but that's much of the point. The PM hasn't a clue that she was doing it and neither would most leaders.

I'm a real sucker for this sort of genrehopping novel and the idea of witchery during wartime is an enticing one. My immediate comparison was to 'Breach' by W. L. Goodwater, notably different in tone because it brought magic to the Cold War rather than World War II, but the mindset isn't too different. Morgan Ryan is new to the game but she conjured up a mature and imaginative story. I did have a handful of minor problems with it but they're the sort that plague a debut novelist, so I already look forward to what she's going to be writing in four or five years.

For one, if it's secret, how can it be a Royal Academy? And why would a secret order, neatly hidden behind a door in a flower shop, require uniforms? That seems odd to me. Neither of these things adversely affects the broader story in any sense, but they did prompt early questions. One bigger issue lies in how easy it was to figure out who the spy within the Academy is, in large part because there isn't much opportunity in this framework to build enough characters for us to choose from. Ryan's misdirection skills still need some work.

However, her imagination is on fire from the outset because this story is set-up wonderfully. The introduction done, we skip forward to 1943 with Lydia at nineteen and teaching projection. This is of the astral variety, just as she used at 10 Downing Street, and it's fundamental to Project Diana, a simply glorious foundation for a genrehopping novel. Put simply, it aims to hunt down artifacts of magical importance before Hitler's occultists do. After the initial research phase, Lydia projects to identify an exact location, not unlike what I do in OpenGuessr without any witchery at all, and then a Traveler goes to fetch. I wanted a Project Diana TV show immediately.

The immediate artifact at hand is the 'Grimorium Bellum', a book of spells dark enough that they could turn the tide of the war. An agent has acquired a mere scrap of a page, but it's enough for a talented Projector like Lydia to be able to connect to it astrally and identify the location. So they perform the necessary ceremony and off she goes. Except, Kitty Fraser, Lydia's best friend at the Academy, promptly slits Isadora's throat partway through and suddenly we're in trouble. Now, it isn't really Kitty, as the real Kitty is upstairs dead; it's a Nazi witch who has been let in to do her deadly work by a mole. As the grand mistress was the one who pushed the witches into the war, a policy about to be sternly reevaluated by whoever will replace her, you realise how much trouble.

In the substantial fallout from this crisis, Lydia leaves rather than face the major restrictions now placed on the grand mistress. She was nominated herself, but now she's undercover in France, as Chloe Moreau, on the trail of the 'Grimorium Bellum'. The rest may want out but she wants in, as much now as before, perhaps even more. And now, Part I done, we meet the other key players in the story to come. This is fundamentally about Lydia Polk, but it's also about Rebecca and Henry. Rebecca is a believably bitter young Jew in the French Resistance. Henry is American, the son of a vodou priestess. All three of them will prove crucial to the quest at hand.

There's a lot here about outsiders, people who are different and can do different things. While it seems that the Nazis have witches too, their side is all about purging Germany of outsiders. They deserve death, from the Nazi perspective, because there are ideals they hold sacred and only the carbon copy people who reach those ideals are worthy of life. Here's where I'd usually suggest the good guys don't limit themselves in such a ridiculous fashion, but they kinda do and this becomes the most biting aspect of the book. Everyone who makes a difference is an outsider, a persecuted outsider at that, and yet they're who we need to get the job done.

For instance, the argument in the Academy against lending their talents to the Allied cause is the fact that Britain hasn't treated witches well historically. We used to hang them and burn them at the stake. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, right? Well, why would they help their oppressors? Lydia isn't just a witch but, due to the circumstances she finds herself in, a witch at odds with her peers and her Academy. She's not quite an outcast but she's working her way towards it.

Rebecca is French in an occupied France, but she's also lesbian and Jewish. Henry is black and, war aside, a fan of France. "In America, when you're a Black man, you're a boy," he states. "It doesn't matter how old, or how educated. You're a boy until the day you die." However, "In France, I'm a man." I won't spoil any of the details that are revealed in the second half, but there's more and I was on board with that because of the background we've already been given and the situation in play to bring it to light. That seemed entirely appropriate to me.

What didn't was another character we meet very early in the book suddenly turning out to be an awful lot more than she initially seemed. There are reasons given but they're not as appropriate to my way of thinking and this angle felt a little cheap, especially after how much good work Ryan had put in to get to that point. There's so much good here, for any novel, let alone a debut one. I just wish I could say that there isn't any bad. Put together, it works well and it kept me engrossed for four hundred pages. Ryan should be proud of her debut. However, the couple of quibbles, this deus ex machina character and the obvious identity of the Nazi mole in Academy ranks take off a little of the shine.

I want to read Ryan's next book. I especially want to read the one after that and, most of all, the one after that. She's clearly a talent to watch. Oh, and I still want that Project Diana TV show. ~~ Hal C F Astell