Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments

 Book 3 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from January 4 - 6

Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T.L. Huchu

published 2022

Summary (via the book jacket)

Ropa Moya's ghostalking practice has tanked. Desperate for money to pay bills and look after her family, she reluctantly accepts a job to look into the history of a coma patient receiving treatment at the magical private hospital Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments. The patient is a teenage schoolboy called Max Wu, and healers at the hospital are baffled by his illness, which has confounded medicine and magic.

Roma's investigation leads her to the Edinburgh Ordinary School for Boys, one of only four registered schools for magic in the whole of Scotland (the oldest and the only one that remains closed to female students).

But the headmaster there is hiding something, and as more students succumb, Ropa learns that a long-dormant and malevolent entity has once again taken hold in this world.

She sets off to track the current host for this spirit and try to stop it before other lives are endangered.

My Opinion

2 stars

I was hesitant starting this because I didn't absolutely love the first one but I finished it and had this second one immediately available so I decided to give it a try.  If I was reading it on its own I'd probably give it 3 stars but I liked it less than The Library of the Dead so I dropped it to a 2 to reflect that.

There wasn't much character building in this book and the dynamics of the characters was why I was interested in continuing.  As far as the mysteries themselves, there were some surprises but it also felt like a lot of buildup for anticlimactic resolutions.

There are definitely readers out there for this series but unfortunately, I'm not one of them and won't be continuing.