My aunt and I once made a cake without eggs. We were talking to each other and got distracted, but when we pulled the cake out of the oven and tried to cut it we knew what we’d done wrong. It had no cohesiveness to it, no structure binding it together. Amazingly enough, another one of my aunts ate the whole thing anyway. I kept thinking of that cake while I read The Trouble with Magic, a book with mostly decent characters, a semi-interesting plot, and a generally agreeable setting – but entirely lacking a coherent infrastructure.

Felicity Malcolm Childe has a gift that seems more like a curse to her. Whenever she touches an object or a person, she has visions and feels psychic impressions. While this can be pleasant, much of the time it’s not, and she lives in fear of touching something upsetting that will cause her to faint. Felicity knows of a book her family owned a century ago that contains a recipe capable of destroying her unwanted gift. While she and her sister Christina are on a visit to another sister, they decide to run away toward Edinburgh, where they believe the book to be.

While they are at an inn negotiating transportation, they are overheard by Ewen Ives, an in-law of sorts. Two of Ewen’s brothers are married to Felicity’s sisters, and Ives men are known to have a thing for Malcolm women. Ewen is suffering from financial difficulties, and intends to go to Edinburgh himself to marry an heiress. Reluctantly, he agrees to accompany Felicity and Christina north, where they will stay in an old castle owned by Aidan Dougal. Aidan is a random, strange man whom everyone happens to know. He’s some sort of relative, but no one seems to know how he is related to anyone, how he makes his living, or why he shows up in odd places at odd times with his on-again-off-again Scottish accent. They don’t know, and they don’t care. Every character in the book shares this general lack of curiosity about him.

While Felicity and Christina look for the book, Ewen gears himself up for marriage to a shrewd but annoying bride. He also conducts business meetings with his partners. Like Aidan, these characters pop up at random at different homes, with little or no explanation. Ewen is in dire financial straits because a dam he helped design collapsed, and he felt responsible for the damage. He took out a loan to repay some villagers who had lost homes, and now he can’t pay it back.

Ewen and Felicity are attracted to each other, and Felicity soon finds that Ewen is one man she can touch without hurting herself. They decide to “experiment” with touching during a party, and their subsequent discovery by several of Ewen’s business associates (and his erstwhile fiancée) leads to an accidental marriage. This leads, finally, to the main conflict: Ewen and Felicity love each other, but don’t know how they can make their marriage a real one. Ewen has debt coming out of his ears, and Felicity’s rich father is unlikely to give her a dowry under the circumstances.

This book would have been fairly easy to like if only it had made more sense. Ewen is an interesting character. He’s an inventor who is more interested in ideas than in practicality, and Felicity serves as a grounding influence, helping him direct his talents and prove his innocence. Even though Felicity has her gift, she’s probably the less compelling of the two. She’s been sheltered all her life (lest she touch something dangerous), and she’s never done any meaningful thinking about her gift until Ewen comes along.

The generally likable characters and their mostly interesting problems are unfortunately stuck in a book where little makes sense. It’s almost as if the author didn’t want to bother with the little details and confined herself to writing the “interesting parts.” In this book people show up at random with no explanation as to how they got there (or why they would be there). Scenes end abruptly with no transition or closure. Little backstory is provided about the Malcolms, and we’re never told why everyone around them accepts their odd abilities as a matter of course. In short, nothing makes sense.

Any book with paranormal undertones functions in an alternate reality, but in order for the reality to be believable it must have some rules and some sort of structure. Felicity and her sisters are essentially eighteenth-century X-Men (X-Women?). One can smell emotions, one can see auras, and another is a gifted herbalist who creates potions and perfumes with extraordinary powers. Society never even bats an eye. But then society in this book in unusually fluid. Class differences are all but non-existent, with nobleman, businessmen, and everyone in between running in the same circles. Titles and forms of address vary according to whim. Sometimes Felicity is Lady Felicity. Just as often, her given name is used by everyone. Ewen is usually just Ewen (not Mr. Ives).

Oddly enough, I couldn’t even figure out where many of the characters lived. We know that Felicity has rarely left London, so obviously she must live there. But Ewen has no home, and not much of a past either. Ewen’s business associates apparently live in Scotland. Presumably Edinburgh is their home base, but they also spend much of their time traveling, alone and separately, to wherever Ian happens to be at the moment – they show up at parties, small gatherings, family estates, and presumably weddings and bar mitzvahs. And again, no one wonders why this happens – in this book it’s strictly “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The book does gain a little more structure as it goes on, but it’s really too little, too late. In a better-crafted book, Ewen and Felicity might have made a compelling pair. Perhaps this might appeal to those who don’t need much order to the universe. Perhaps, like my aunt, you’ll eat a cake with no eggs – even knowing one with eggs is in the oven. Perhaps, but probably not.