What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

I listened to this book as an (English) audiobook as a kid while on a road trip from my family, around 2009-2011. My mother got it from the library and returned it after we got back- I’ve asked her about it and she doesn’t remember it. The audiobook was a recording on a physical CD, and I think the book’s cover on the CD case might have been pastel colored with a lot of blue, but I could be wrong about this.

The book was a kids/middle grade fantasy. It took place in two different worlds/dimensions, one Earth and another a world called Faerie or something similar related to fairies. Humans had figured out how to travel to other dimensions, but Faerie was the only place they’d found where humans could survive and now a lot of humans lived there and it was a very normal thing.

In their society (spread across Earth and Faerie), everyone got a special talent/quality bestowed on them at birth. Most would be things like “having a kind heart” or “being brave” but some would be more powerful, like being able to take to animals. This would be given to babies by people who did this as their job, traveling to family’s houses when a child was born and giving them the talent assigned to them.

The story starts out with two adult perspectives, two different men who have the job of giving out talents. Guy 1 is arrogant and rude, and when he goes to give a baby girl the talent of “having a generous nature” and her dad asks him to give her something powerful, he gets irritated and twists the talent as he’s bestowing it on her, thinking “Yes, she’ll have a talent for giving...giving away other people’s things.” Separately, guy 2 is nicer but when he’s giving a baby boy the talent of “being honest”, he loses control of it for a reason I can’t remember and makes it too powerful, making the boy incapable of lying.

Later on, it shows some kind of magical college where wizards can demonstrate their magical research before a review board to ask for funding. Guy 1 goes up, and it shows he’s upper class and has a super fancy wand with gemstones on it. He uses magic to artificially grow strawberries from nothing, which everyone is really impressed by, although when the main head of the review board tries the strawberries he says “If only they didn’t taste like sweetened glue!” Still, guy 1’s request is approved because of his high class.

After that, guy 2 goes up. Everyone immediately dismisses him because he’s lower class and his wand isn’t a very powerful one. However, guy 2 says “What if we could trick a wand into thinking it’s a more powerful kind than it is?” He does this and then asks for the head of the review board to transfer all the magic from his very powerful wand into guy 2’s weaker one, when guy 2’s wand shouldn’t have enough capacity to hold all the magic from the head’s wand. Instead, guy 2’s wand draws in all the magic from the head’s wand and still has some space left over in it for more, which the head is really startled by. He wants to give guy 2 funding, but everyone else still doesn’t take him seriously because he’s not upper class/from a noble family and they reject him.

After that, it switches to the perspectives of the kids who had their talent giving rituals messed up. They’re now around 8-12 I think, I don’t think they were teenagers. The boy can’t ever lie so all the other kids his age hate him because he always snitches on them no matter how hard he tries not to. The girl compulsively steals things. Guy 2 meets them, talks to their parents, and takes them away to a magical school he teaches at where they can study (I can’t remember whether this was something the talent giving bureau ordered him to do or if he just did it personally because he felt responsibility for their talents getting messed up).

At the school, the kids learn this magic that progressively gets more difficult by rankings of colors, where red magic is basic and the easiest to learn and violet/purple magic is arcane, dangerous and very difficult. Guy 2 teaches them personally, teaching them red magic, but guy 1 requests to teach them in private as well, which guy 2 allows reluctantly. Guy 2 soon notices that after sessions with guy 1, the two kids will seem strangely weak and tired and their magic power will be less for several days. Guy 2 finally bursts into one of the sessions between the kids and guy 1 to confront him and finds guy 1 teaching them violet magic/performing it on them. Guy 1 uses violet magic to create a portal to another place and sends all three of them through it and then closes the portal, trapping them in that other place.

This is as far as we got through the audiobook (I’m pretty sure this was just the first 10 chapters at most), so I don’t know anything past this. I’ve been wondering about this book ever since, so I’d appreciate help finding it!

Bump

Just to let you know that I am searching for this, but no joy so far... you've provided so many specific details, I really hope someone will see it and recognise it.

Thank you, Becca! I was starting to worry that my post being so long to read through was part of why nobody had responded ^^;

I've tried searching as well, but nada. This would have to have been fairly well known in order to get an audio book release.

Are you positive that the alternate world was connected to fairies? Maybe check the Fairies in Children's Fiction list.

Rainbowheart, I don’t think the other world was actually based in fairy mythology very much, if at all. I think the people from there were slightly different from humans, but for the most part “Faerie” was just a name that didn’t really signify anything and that world was very close to Earth, with only a few practical differences between them. I have the feeling that it wasn’t very much like another world at all, and for the most part it was treated like an extension of Earth in terms of the story. Sorry, I should have clarified this.

It sounds like the same book that C is looking for in this post:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Still no joy, but perhaps combining details from the two posts might help us find it?

C was in Australia when they read it - where were you? Was the audiobook narrator British, Australian, American, can you remember?

Wait, I think I've found it! The Truth about Magic by Dave Luckett.

Becca, that’s it! I honestly never thought I’d find it again. Thank you for the time you put into finding this for me and the other person who posted.