Illusion of a Boar, by Celia Lake

In March of 1944, four magical specialists are brought together at a secret camp for an even more mysterious mission.

Hypatia and Cammie adopted each other as sisters twenty years ago, during their school years, after Cammie’s mother married Hypatia’s older brother. Cammie has been neck deep in signals work since the start of the Second World War, while Hypatia has used her gift for sympathetic magic and materia to support the war effort. All while keeping up the proper standards for ATS girls, of course.

Pulled from similar work in Scotland, Claudio knows the most about what’s needed and about what resources might actually be available. That’s a big problem, but he’s far more worried about his chosen brother, Orion.

Orion’s war had been comparatively simple until six months ago. After an injury invalided him out of active service using his magic to support the front lines in the Mediterranean, he came home to find betrayal. Now he’s figuring out where to begin rebuilding any sense of himself and his place in the world.

None of them have enough information or access to resources for what they’re being asked to do. And they’re doing it in a camp that has no idea what to make of them and that has its own deep secrets. When the challenges keep coming, they have to figure out whether and how they can trust each other and whether their objective is even possible.

Illusion of a Boar takes on the run-up to D-Day inside the magical community of Albion, figuring out what magic could help turn the tides in their favour. It’s about trust, choosing new paths, and just maybe taking a chance on love and romance. The fifth book in the Land Mysteries series, it can be read in any order.

Albion at war

Take two sets of chosen siblings, all of them highly intelligent and magically skilled in different areas. Task them with finding a way to magically help the Allied war effort—on their own, isolated on a secret Army base, with little support (magical or otherwise), and forbidden to discuss their project with anyone else. That’s the situation that Claudio, Orion, Hypatia, and Cammie find themselves in at the start of Illusion of a Boar. It’s the kind of situation that inevitably leads to deep enmity or lifelong friendships… and in this instance, also to love.

Each of the characters has their own burdens, challenges, and/or secrets. Orion came back from the front missing part of his hand, only to become embroiled in a messy divorce. He fears that the wound means he’ll never be able to Challenge for the Council. Orion is on the autism spectrum, and doesn’t always understand why other people react the way they do, which frustrates him. Claudio feels the weight of command, and he’s deeply worried about his chosen brother. Hypatia and Cammie have had to deal with sexist assumptions and the expectations about women officers, as well as occasional racism. They hope that Captains Sisley and Warren, being of Albion (the secret magical community), will see them as equal in this project and behave like gentlemen, but until they’re sure, they will be on their guard against any assumptions or liberties. Cammie worries about her fiancé, an RAF pilot; she also has a secret talent which only her nearest and dearest are aware of, and she prefers to keep it that way.

The project assigned to them is daunting, to say the least, and the conditions are pretty spartan. But slowly, as they each take one another’s measure, the four become a working team, and then firm friends… and in Orion and Hypatia’s case, eventually something more.

I love all four of these characters. They are familiar to me from previous books, where they were minor characters in their school years. Now they are fully adult, in their mid-20s to early 30s, facing the challenges of WWII with courage and fierce determination.

And those challenges are formidable, from tense relations with some of the other officers at the base to the discovery of a potential spy, not to mention the knotty problem of how to mislead the enemy and hide an invasion force. Celia Lake is a meticulous researcher, so everything from the base’s location to the small details of uniforms, rationing, transportation, and communication rings true. Of course, being magical, the quartet do have some resources not available to the non-magical soldiers and officers, like magically-heated hot water, cleaning charms, and transportation portals, but the historical details serve to ground the fantasy elements in the grittier realities of war-time Britain. There’s some humor to balance the grimness of war, but it’s not a light and fluffy book. To be fair, I would not describe any of Celia’s books as light and fluffy, although they are generally warm and comforting because they are full of competent, intelligent people being kind and doing their best to make the world a better place. In that, Illusion of a Boar is no exception.

I have read Illusion of a Boar several times (as I have almost all of Celia’s books), and each time I enjoy it at least as much for the exploration of friendship as for the romance. I am tempted to give it 5 stars, but I settled on 4.5, because I what the quartet are doing for the war effort is left somewhat vague… or rather, what they are doing is reasonably clear, but specifically how they are doing it is left more nebulous and undefined than I prefer. Also, the romantic relationship between Orion and Hypatia, when it finally begins, takes off almost out of nowhere and goes from zero to sixty in next to no time, whereas my preference is usually for a slow burn. But other than those two relatively minor quibbles, I do love this book and the four characters at its heart, and I’d very much like to see more of them. (Note: There are more scenes with Orion and Hypatia in some of Celia’s extras, which are currently available to her Patreon subscribers and will eventually be available to everyone. Cammie makes a few appearances in in Edmund Carillon’s post-war romance, Apt to be Suspicious. And I am eagerly awaiting Claudio’s promised romance!)

Illusion of a Boar is the 5th book in the Land Mysteries series, although it can be read in any order. If you would like to see these characters before they reach adulthood, Orion and Claudio are Isembard Fortier’s students and special charges in Eclipse (Isembard and Thesan’s romance.) Cammie’s mother Pross and Hypatia’s much older brother Ibis have a romance in Magician’s Hoard; Cammie has several scenes but Hypatia is only mentioned. Both girls show up again in the novella Chasing Legends, when Ibis has joined the faculty at Schola, the magical school all four of them attended. (Chasing Legends can be found in the collection Winter’s Charms.)

NOTE: Celia Lake talks about the book, and her favorite part of it, in a post on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog. She also writes about taking the story from idea to book on her own blog.

Challenges: COYER 2026: Out to Lunch Again

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• COYER 2026: Out to Lunch Again

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